Top 100 Life Literature Quotes
#1. There are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.
Daphne Kalotay
#2. Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.
Richard Brookhiser
#3. I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is.
Barbara Christian
#5. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
Polykarp Kusch
#6. Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and are looking for clarity concerning the life that they are engulfed in.
Noah Cicero
#7. What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?
Jeanette Winterson
#8. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#9. Fantasy stories will always be popular, as there are always readers who are willing to escape, freely, to the worlds that the authors create, and spend time with the characters we give life to.
Jason Ellis
#10. Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
Witold Gombrowicz
#12. There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis ... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.
Michael Jensen
#13. Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible - time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.
Richard Ford
#14. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.
Tom Spanbauer
#15. I believe in reverencing anything in the life of man which has the testimony of the ages as being unexcelled, whether it be literature, paintings, poetry, tombs -- even a golf hole.
C.B. MacDonald
#17. Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
Cesare Pavese
#19. Life is seen as an ongoing war between art and philistinism - and although the philistines may win some of the battles, it is literature that always wins the war.
Helon Habila
#20. People didn't make life, so they can't destroy it. Even if we were to wipe out every bit of life in the world, we can't touch the place life comes from. Whatever made the plants and animals and people spring up in the first place will always be there, and life will spring up again.
Jeanne DuPrau
#21. The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
#22. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#23. Life every now and then becomes literature ... as if life had been made and not happened.
Norman Maclean
#24. I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.
Muhammad Iqbal
#26. The notion of "cause and effect" is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in "cause and cause" or "effect and effect" or "and and and".
Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff
#27. Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
Charles Frahman
#28. Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.
Richard Ford
#29. Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
Jane Smiley
#30. Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus wrong is born.
Bart Hopkins
#32. We all R failures that's why V need #CHILDREN to fulfill D needs of #Society,#Nation,#Worlds , so that we can live the same old selfish way
Tushar Upreti
#33. The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.
Bruno Bettelheim
#35. I want to
peel away all the labels
I had once given to others
and place them
upon the fabric
of my own identity.
They have reflected back to me,
everything that I refuse
to See in myself.
Meraaqi
#36. I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.
Mohsin Hamid
#37. If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.
Tom Hodgkinson
#38. This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
Julian Barnes
#39. Every game, and almost every life situation, has short cuts: ways you can get better without learning the entire literature of the game from beginning to end.
James Altucher
#40. One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.
Alain De Botton
#41. Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#42. People keep asking me, "Where do you get the ideas for your books?"
From the worst moments in my life.
I call that "literature through disaster." I got the whole Tales from Earth's End Saga that way, as well as Numenon. Don't be afraid of the hard times.
Sandy Nathan
#43. The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.
Ian McEwan
#44. I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.
Aberjhani
#45. For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.
Akira Kurosawa
#46. Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.
James Frey
#47. In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.
That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.
Ayn Rand
#48. Literature may be light as a cobweb, but it must be fastened down to life at the four corners.
Nellie L. McClung
#49. Dualism ... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
Aldous Huxley
#50. I write to breath life back into memory to remind African-Americans of our rich and textured history. I also see myself as a "root," and for me the "fierce winds" include the marginalization-the downright segregation-of literature written by people of color.
Bernice L. McFadden
#51. I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.
Luke Rhinehart
#52. It is the life in literature that acts upon life.
J.G. Holland
#53. Someone had to go first, show that there was a life to be recorded here, that this place, this new set of possibilities, could inspire a new literature. Cooper set the signpost on the road, and hearty travelers have been following it ever since.
Thomas C. Foster
#54. I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.
Rafael Moneo
#55. It seems to me as I reviewed the literature that, with few exceptions, the more confident were the prescriptions about how to behave with ethics and integrity, the further removed was the author from the life and work of the everyday manager.
Steve Kerr
#56. Sometimes, authors' descriptions of unique fictional characters are like mirrors that reflect the readers image back.
Ben Abix
#57. In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.
Sei Shonagon
#58. Never try to outgrow the people who were helping you walk,
when you could not even walk.
Akash Lakhotia
#59. All those who leave immigrate to better lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matter, not the life, I thought. Maybe we, like elephants, walk towards our chosen burials.
Rawi Hage
#60. We have the power to shape our lives, by the way we think. Only that to have a progressive life, we must train ourselves into thinking in a certain way.
Ndiritu Wahome
#61. It is not the jumps you made in your life but mostly the jumps you haven't made are the real source of regrets in your life!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#62. The writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.
Flannery O'Connor
#63. With 'Ilustrado,' I set out to change the way we read literature, and I think I failed spectacularly. In fact, I know I failed. In reaching further than I could, I may not have produced a life- or literature-changing book, but I did produce one I am proud of.
Miguel Syjuco
#64. When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.
Michael Foreman
#65. If it were really up to me, I would study literature and creative writting. I would major it it, if I really could. But whose life these days are really up to the person living it?
Molly Lynn Robinson
#66. Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
Phillips Brooks
#67. 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.
Ben Okri
#68. I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun ... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus ... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.
Roman Payne
#69. This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
Reif Larsen
#70. My evolution into becoming a photojournalist started with falling in love with literature when I was a teenager, falling in love with novels and imagining a life of being a storyteller.
Ed Kashi
#71. You might like that one. But I'll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly ( ... )
Matthew Quick
#72. Writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
Susan Sontag
#73. What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Susan Sontag
#74. 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.
Philip Larkin
#75. Literature is such a profound and deep way to look into someone else's life, his mind, his hopes and thoughts. Books have opened so many doors for me, taking me to places where my normal life and its finite limits could never have.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#76. My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.
Adalbert Stifter
#77. It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
Gao Xingjian
#78. When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.
Nicole Krauss
#79. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
Michael Cunningham
#80. Every kingdom has three pillars: Poet, Sword and Law.
Lara Biyuts
#81. Your life will be colourful if you just add colours to your life! It is your own decisions that will determine to have a miserable or a marvellous life!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#82. Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.
M.H. Abrams
#83. I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.
Roman Payne
#84. During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist ... literature had stopped.
Boris Pasternak
#85. In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
J.M. Coetzee
#86. What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
George Bernard Shaw
#87. Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.
Antonio Tabucchi
#88. He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.
Henry James
#90. I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
Grace Paley
#91. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#92. Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
Aristotle.
#93. Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
Edward Abbey
#94. You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.
Donald Miller
#95. Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...
Chris Campanioni
#96. When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.
Frederick Sanger
#97. Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.
Harold Bloom
#98. I found that dance, music, and literature is how I made sense of the world ... it pushed me to think of things bigger than life's daily routines ... to think beyond what is immediate or convenient.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#99. 'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
#100. Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.
Roman Payne
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