L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.”
Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
“Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.”
Source: The Thursday Next Collection 1-3: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots
“Literary devices are to literature what salt is to food, sugar is to cake, fragrance is to a rose, and the soul is to the body!”
Source: By the River Mandovi
“Literary education is of no value, if it is not able to build up a sound character.”
Source: The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts
“Literary education must follow the education of the hand -the one gift that distinguishes man from beast.”
“Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”
Source: An Experiment in Criticism
“Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.”
“Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.”
“Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.”
“Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings.”
“Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one's mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks.”
“Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.”
“Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.”
“Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.”
“Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.”
“Literary lineage is part of your autobiography. The authors are the literary base, the image base, the character base that you bring into your civilian work. Same with film, architecture, music, sports. That's one tributary of the autobiography.”
“Literary men are . . . a perpetual priesthood.”
“Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.”
“Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.””
“Literary newspapers, since they print the daily smatterings of commonplace people, are especially a cunning means for robbing from the aesthetic public the time which should be devoted to the genuine productions of art for the furtherance of culture.”
Source: Essays and aphorisms
“Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.”
“Literary Party: A traffic jam of the lost waiting for the ferry across the Styx.”
“Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.”
Source: The Colby essays ...
“Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.”
“Literary prizes have always sparked controversy. Their validity has always been questioned as the criteria to determine books merits are subjective.”
“Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.”
“Literary qualifications have no more to do with it than oratory has with salesmanship. One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly, and convincingly, just as a salesman must.”
Source: Scientific Advertising Origins
“Literary revolution and revolutionary literature did not create a beautiful new world but instead divested literature of its basic nature, promoted violence, and, by resorting to linguistic violence, made a battlefield of this domain of spiritual freedom.”
“Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.”
“Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.”
Source: Making History
“Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order.”
“Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.”
“Literary theories will not make a writer write.”
“Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.”
“Literary tradition is full of lies about poverty-the jolly beggar, the poor but happy milkmaid, the wholesome diet of porridge, etc.”
“Literary translation is not merely an act of picking words from one language and keeping it by dipping in the vessel of another language. Those words need to be rinsed, washed, carved and decorated as much as possible.”
“Literary translations construct cultural bridges and enlarge our horizons.”
“Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything to its needs.”
“Literary work couldn't seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.”
Source: In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
“Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.”
Source: How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
Source: Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic
“Literate households in the 17th century would have had the Bible, John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," and a couple of other books. Shakespeare plays were cheap, so you could buy those, but a folio cost a pound, which was an incredible amount of money then.”
“Literately’ was used in a novel by Elizabeth Griffiths. While no other examples of use have been forthcoming, it is, in my opinion, an elegant extension of ‘literate’. Dr. Murray agreed I should write an entry for the Dictionary, but I have since been told it is unlikely to be included. It seems our lady author has not proved herself a ‘literata’- an abomination of a word coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that refers to a ‘literary lady’. It too has only one example of use, but its inclusion is assured. This may sound like sour grapes, but I can’t see it catching on. The number of literary ladies in the world is surely so great as to render them ordinary and deserving members of the literati.”
Source: The Dictionary of Lost Words
“Literatura este un lucru misterios, în timp ce scrii și te afli în raport direct, mistic aproape, cu pagina albă de hârtie, îți dai seama că ești supus unor forțe imposibil de definit cu precizie. Cuvintele, odată eliberate, au dreptul la anumite inițiative. Ce orgoliu, să crezi că poți construi tu însuți o carte, cînd de fapt cuvintele te scriu pe tine și te construiesc!”
Source: Sindromul de panică în Orașul Luminilor
“Literatura lor conţine citeva din cele mai lungi romane şi piese de teatru din lume, unele dintre ele de o inaltă ţinută literară, dar aptitudinea specială a japonezului pentru detaliul splendid şi sugestiv n-a fost egalată de înzestrarea sa pentru construcţie… Privind retrospectiv, ne reamintim romanul prin fărîme minunat colorate ce se îmbină cumva .într-un întreg nedefinit. Şi aşa cum pictorii impresionişti europeni creează o iluzie de realitate în ciuda faptului că peisajele lor sînt compuse, aparent arbitrar din stropi de vei'de, portocaliu, albastru şi toate celelalte culori, tot astfel intîmplările aparent discontinue ale unui roman japonez, contopindu-se una în alta, ne lasă impresia înţelegerii vagi a vieţii nipone.”
Source: Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers
“Literatura pomaga nam rozpoznać się w cudzych istnieniach".”
Source: Lalka i perła
“Literatura poważna nie jest po to, żeby ułatwiać życie, tylko żeby je utrudniać.”
Source: Dziennik 1957-1961
“Literatura to szczególny rodzaj wiedzy, to... (...) ... doskonałość form nieprecyzyjnych.”
Source: Księgi Jakubowe
“Literature + Illness = Illness”