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Book: How to Read Literature
Quotes of Book: How to Read Literature
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  1. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    The theatre can teach us some truth, but it is the truth of the illusory nature of our existence. It can alert us to the dream-like quality of our lives, their brevity, mutability and lack of solid grounds. As such, by reminding us of our mortality, it can foster in us the virtue of humility.
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  2. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word 'professor' on his application.
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  3. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the 'literariness' of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
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  4. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
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  5. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    We live in a world in which there is nothing that cannot be narrated, but nothing that needs to be either.
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  6. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The truth, however, is that human beings are uncommon only up to a point. There are no qualities that are peculiar to one person alone. Regrettably, there could not be a world in which only one individual was irascible, vindictive or lethally aggressive. This is because human beings are not fundamentally all that different from each other, a truth postmodernists are reluctant to concede. We share an enormous amount in common simply by virtue of being human, and this is revealed by the vocabularies we have for discussing human character. We even share the social processes by which we come to individuate ourselves.
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  7. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.
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  8. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    It is said that an eighteenth-century bishop who read Jonathan Swift's novel threw the book into the fire, indignantly declaring that he didn't believe a word of it. He obviously thought that the story was meant to be true, but suspected that it was invented. Which, of course, is just what it is. The bishop was dismissing the fiction because he thought it was fiction.
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  9. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    Enjoyment is more subjective than evaluation. Whether you prefer peaches to pears is a question of taste, which is not quite true of whether you think Dostoevsky a more accomplished novelist than John Grisham. Dostoevsky is better than Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga.
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  10. Terry Eagleton _ How to Read Literature

    Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the playwright for some hints as to what his characters were up to before they came on stage. Pinter's reply was 'Mind your own fucking business.
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