Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.

Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do?

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

Liberals believe they own the franchise on minorities and can't stand any Hispanic or black who breaks rank.

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.

Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature.

Life is lived on levels and arrived at in stages.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

Life should imitate romance literature far more often.

Life without literary studies is death.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Life is so unlike theory.

Light is the symbol of truth.

Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause.

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

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 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 ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

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, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

Literature + Illness = Illness

Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.

Literature is the best way to overcome death.

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).

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 gives us the great gift of the present moment.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.

Literature is achieved anxiety.

Literature is a great staff, but a very sorry crutch.

Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity.

Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

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.