L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.”
“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.”
“Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.”
“Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.”
“Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.”
Source: Barthes: Selected Writings
“Literature is literature. Its purpose is to challenge and disorient us, to break us down a little bit so that we are forced to rebuild ourselves. Over time, over the course of many books, we construct a deeper, truer self.”
“Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.”
“Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”
Source: The Man with the Golden Arm: 50th Anniversary Critical Edition
“Literature is man's exploration of man by artificial light, which is better than natural light because we can direct it where we want.”
“Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.”
“Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.”
“Literature is my Utopia”
“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.”
Source: The Story of My Life
“Literature is news that stays news.”
“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”
Source: A woman's essays: selected essays, volume one
“Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.”
Source: Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation
“Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.”
“Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.”
Source: Anatomy of Criticism
“Literature is not an instruction manual.”
Source: Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
“Literature is not at the service of the government; on the contrary, governments should do everything in their power to create a favourable climate for literature.”
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.”
Source: Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
“Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.”
“Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.”
“Literature is not only the reflection of life but also of death!”
“Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.”
Source: Conversations with Nadine Gordimer
“Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.”
“Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.”
Source: THE HUMBUGS OF THE WORLD
“Literature is painting, architecture, and music.”
“Literature is sacred knowledge”
“Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.”
Source: The Educated Imagination
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Source: A Room of One's Own
“Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.”
“Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.”
Source: Empire of the Senseless
“Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.”
“Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is.”
“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.”
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.”
“Literature is the best way to overcome death.”
“Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He's the happiest man on earth when he's performing, but when the show is over, he's sad and troubled. I wish he could live in the eternal present, because in the theater everything remains in memories and photographs. Literature, on the other hand, allows you to live in the present and to remain in the pantheon of the future.
Literature is a way to say, I was here, this is what I thought, this is what I perceived. This is my signature, this is my name.”
“Literature is the daughter of heaven, who descended upon earth to soften and charm all human ills.”
“Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.”
“Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.”
“Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.”
Source: Alternating Current
“Literature is the expression of society.”
“Literature is the garden of wisdom.”
“Literature is the history of the soul.”
Source: Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories
“Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”