L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
“Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.”
Source: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence
“Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.”
Source: The Essential James Branch Cabell Collection
“Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.”
“Literature is a vast ocean, in which one has to drown themselves to be able to conquer it. Those on shore can see a side of it or have tasted a part of it. And I choose to drown myself in it than just to see it.”
“literature is a way in which we can learn to live deeper lives -- husband with wife, parent with child, brother with sister, fellow member with fellow member. Most good authors are better than we are. They are much better company than our own friends.
What comes from good company? What comes from good company is better manners, greater sensitivity, greater sensibility, greater empathy, great sympathy. Reading good literature makes us more capable of understanding other people, of loving other people, those whom we don't particularly want to love, even our enemies, as well as those closest to us. How can we expect to have full marriages when we are not going into those marriages with full minds and fine sensibilities? We are ignoring the tremendous possibilities of a delicate, well-poised, rich, sensitive life if we ignore the literature of the past. There is no substitute.”
Source: Abundance of the Heart
“Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts.”
“Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.”
“Literature is about getting in touch. It sounds so hippie, but it really is about sharing stuff. We are a community that doesn't seem to be important for the rest of society, but we are people who want to get in touch - really in touch. We want to be thinking together.”
“Literature is about telling stories.”
“Literature is about telling stories. Now, the gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded. It may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.”
“Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity.”
“Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.”
Source: Little Wilson and Big God
“Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly. ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had.”
“Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.”
Source: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement
“Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.”
“Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.”
“Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.”
“Literature is an act of resistance against dehumanization. War and trauma numb our senses and freeze our feelings. Literature restores us, awakens our feelings, and returns to us our sense of individuality and integrity.”
“Literature is an aspect of story and story is all that exists to make sense of reality. War is a story. Now you begin to see how powerful story is because it informs our worldview and our every action, our every justification is a story. So how can story not be truly transformative? I've seen it happen in real ways, not in sentimental ways or in the jargon of New Age liberal ideology.”
“Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.”
“Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.”
“Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.”
Source: Ilustrado: A Novel
“Literature is an inquiry into the deepest yearnings of the human spirit.”
Source: Ernest L. Boyer, Selected Speeches, 1979-1995
“literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.”
“Literature is an investment of genius which pays dividends to all subsequent times.”
“Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world!”
“Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none”
Source: The journal of Jules Renard
“Literature is analysis after the event.”
Source: The Golden Notebook
“Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their responsibilities have been decreed by our species... the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
“Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed”
Source: America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
“Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.”
Source: The Principles of Success in Literature
“Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.”
“Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.”
“Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.”
Source: The prime of life
“Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console.”
Source: Letters and Panegyricus
“Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.”
“Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.”
“Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.”
“Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler. It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue.”
“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”
“Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.”
“Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.”
“Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this... At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.”
Source: The Prevention of Literature
“Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.”
“Literature is eavesdropping.”
Source: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838-1842
“Literature is greater than any of us, dammit.”
“Literature is humanity talking to itself.”
“Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.”
“Literature is inexhaustible, with every book a homage to infinity”