Terry Eagleton Quotes on Literature
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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.
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[Literature] is organised violence committed on ordinary speech.
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Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob.
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Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman 'other' or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.