L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.”
“Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.”
“Literature acknowledges that life is complicated.”
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.”
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
“Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.”
“Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.”
“Literature and art are one of a number of relationships I have with the world. Like you have relationships with your friends and a relationship with your lover and your relationship with your family and your relationship with your work - sometimes it's really great; sometimes it's non-existent, sometimes it's fruitful.”
“Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.”
“Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
“Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.”
“Literature and gossip are closely related. People who are curious and imaginative long to know 'what it's like for other people.' This longing can be satisfied in its basest, most banal form through gossip, just as it can attain a more refined and complex gratification in art. Both gossip and literature, each in its own way, are capable of offering a partial antidote to fanaticism, because they both relish the fascinating differences between people.”
Source: שלום לקנאים
“Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.”
Source: Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
“Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.”
“Literature, Art, and Fashion possess the power to transform the very essence of what we consider to be reality.”
“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”
Source: The Educated Imagination
“Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.”
“Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.”
Source: Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962
“Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written.”
“Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written. The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.”
“Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.”
“Literature bores me, especially great literature”
Source: 77 Dream Songs: Poems
“Literature can be divided into two large families: the religious and the secular one. The first reveals the origin of stupidity, the second follows its evolution.”
“Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).”
Source: Roland Barthes
“Literature can only imagine hell. For us, the rainy season was a living hell. The epic poets of Hindi have not even touched upon the terrible sufferings of the villages. What a monstrous truth that is.”
Source: Joothan: An Untouchable's Life
“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
Source: Let the Great World Spin: A Novel
“Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.”
“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.”
Source: Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung
“Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.”
“Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.
(Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte)”
“Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers”
“Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.”
Source: The Kingdom of the Wicked
“Literature , comes to be explained now from my orphan mind and my tombstone where only I am the ruler and ruled.”
Source: The Immortal Fly: Eternal Whispers: Based on True Events of a Family
“Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.”
“Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes you more human by making life more, not less, difficult. When you become more aware, the area of moral choice is widened. You can be a better man; you can also be a worse. Literature will not determine which. It is the equivalent of neither grace nor good works.”
“Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.”
“Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.”
Source: The Principles of Success in Literature
“Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.”
“literature does itsnbest to maintain that its concern is with the mind ; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul
looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null , negligible and nonexistent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of
June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant;
it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come
to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which it wages by itself,
with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage
of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. More practically
speaking, the public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it—wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks,
investing certain faces with divinity, setting us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathing the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances
about them for which it has neither time nor liberty in health.”
Source: On Being Ill
“Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.”
“Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.”
“Literature doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!”
“Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record.”
“Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.”
“Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging.... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.”
“Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.”
Source: Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
“Literature exists because the world isn't enough.”
“Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words.”
“Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.”
“Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely”
Source: Literary Taste: How to Form it : with Detailed Instructions for Collecting a Complete Library of English Literature