L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently: as essential to being human and to human progress, individual and collective.”
“Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.”
“Literature presents you with alternate mappings of the human experience. You see that the experiences of other people and other cultures are as rich, coherent, and troubled as your own experiences. They are as beset with suffering as yours. Literature is a kind of legitimate voyeurism through the keyhole of language where you really come to know other people's lives--their anguish, their loves, their passions. Often you discover that once you dive into those lives and get below the surface, the veneer, there is a real closeness.”
“Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.”
“Literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.”
Source: When Breath Becomes Air
“Literature provides us with experiences it would not be wise or possible to introduce into our own world and thus enlarges our understanding of the world.”
“Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.”
Source: Six Memos for the Next Millennium
“Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.”
“Literature rests on language. It is a linguistic art. So it cannot sever its relationship with the past. But it can create new methods and styles that differ in structure, form, and content from the past.”
“Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments.”
Source: The Educated Imagination
“Literature seemed to be everything then. People looked to it for the strength to live, for guidance, for revelation.”
Source: Travels with Herodotus
“Literature shaped my personality. It made me travel various time-zones, study the characters along with their conflicts, strengths and weaknesses. It defined me. It made me strong.”
“Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.”
“Literature should be more revolutionary than revolutions themselves; writers must find the means to continue to be critical of the negative elements in the sociopolitical reality.”
“Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.”
“Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”
“Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
Source: Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations
“Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers.”
“Literature sort of makes your daily operation, your daily conduct, the management of your affairs in the society a bit more complex. And it puts what you do in perspective, and people don't like to see themselves or their activities in perspective. They don't feel quite comfortable with that. Nobody wants to acknowledge the insignificance of his life, and that is very often the net result of reading a poem.”
“Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.”
Source: Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962
“Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.”
Source: The Idea of a University
“Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.”
“Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.”
“Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.”
Source: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
“Literature takes reality and human experience as its starting point, transforms it by means of the imagination, and sends readers back to life with renewed understanding of it and zest for it because of their excursions into a purely imaginary realm.”
Source: The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing
“Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.”
“Literature tells very little to those who understand it.”
Source: Selected Writings: 1913-1926
“Literature that fails to ignite the mind and spur action is lifeless”
“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”
“Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award.”
“Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.”
Source: Literary Theory: An Introduction
“Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.”
Source: Literary Theory: An Introduction
“Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.”
“Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts.”
“Literature ultimately helps one to ground a deeper and wider outlook. An over-directed life without the inner resource to step outside of itself is closed to other beauties and the complexities of character and world.”
“Literature used to shape minds — especially poetry. It formed a person’s inner world, their spirituality. Now we live in an era that glorifies ignorance, and the frightening majority is ruled by mediocrity.”
“Literature usually begets literature.”
Source: Against Interpretation and Other Essays
“Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse.”
“Literature was intended to be dangerous. Art was meant to be dangerous. Ideas were nothing if they were not dangerous.”
“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
“Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. 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, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962”
Source: A Life in Letters
“Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches, nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.”
Source: William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck
“literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.”
“Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”
Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
“Literature wasn't intended to be about perfect people, it was about flaws, very real and very deep human flaws.”
Source: True
“Literature --which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality--seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.”
Source: God's Silence
“Literature will save me it's the only certainty i am sure of.”