Books Quote by Terry Eagleton

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished…

— Terry Eagleton

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more…

— John Steinbeck

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by…

— Storm Jameson

“Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter,…

— James Baldwin

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface,…

— Italo Calvino

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I…

— Dorothy Allison

I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn't have that power anymore in my…

— Miguel Syjuco

Literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts.

— Anonymous

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language…

— Octavio Paz

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves…

— Marjorie Garber

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not…

— Wole Soyinka

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of…

— Lionel Trilling