Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history. – Terry Eagleton
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. – Terry Eagleton
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health. – Terry Eagleton
If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one. – Terry Eagleton
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, users manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest – and yet it is all these things. – Jonathan Safran Foer