4 Terry Eagleton Quotes on Language

Terry Eagleton quotes on language

4. It is silly to call fat people 'gravitationally challenged', a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

6. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

7. [Literature] is organised violence committed on ordinary speech.

10. All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.