Top 59 Literature Is Language Quotes
#1. Literature is language charged with meaning
Ezra Pound
#2. I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]
Northrop Frye
#4. Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Northrop Frye
#5. Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand ... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.
G.H. Hardy
#6. The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, a general preparation for whatever the student may afterward choose for more particular application. The power of drawing, modeling, and using colors, is very properly called the language of the art.
Joshua Reynolds
#7. Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group.
George Orwell
#8. In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.
Patrick White
#9. The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo Calvino
#10. Language is the key to the heart of people.
Ahmed Deedat
#11. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.
Yu Hua
#12. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.
Haruki Murakami
#13. The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.
George Edward Woodberry
#14. With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.
Kingsley Amis
#15. It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
Terry Eagleton
#16. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.
Jeanette Winterson
#17. Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class - or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.
Francine Prose
#18. . . . literature is not frivolous pseudo-statements but takes its place among the acts of language that transform the world, bringing into being the things that they name.
Jonathan Culler
#19. The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.
Freeman Dyson
#20. There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.
Christopher Hitchens
#21. Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It's all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.
Thomas C. Foster
#22. Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.
Joseph Bottum
#23. Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.
Carlos Fuentes
#24. English literature is a glorious inheritance which is open to all - there are no barriers, no coupons, and no restrictions. In the English language and in its great writers there are great riches and treasures, of which, of course, the Bible and Shakespeare stand along on the highest platform.
Winston Churchill
#25. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
Roland Barthes
#26. The Malays can hardly be said to have an indigenous literature, for it is almost entirely derived from Persia, Siam, Arabia, and Java. Arabic is their sacred language.
Isabella Bird
#27. In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
George Bernard Shaw
#28. With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
Terry Eagleton
#29. It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#30. The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.
Imre Kertesz
#31. Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.
Jules Michelet
#33. Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.
David Quammen
#34. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
#35. Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.
Evelyn Waugh
#36. I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.
Penelope Lively
#38. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
Roland Barthes
#39. Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks.
Raymond Moody
#40. I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
#41. The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.
Minae Mizumura
#42. Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.
Storm Jameson
#43. There is a wealth of readership for regional language literature in India that is not given importance. We must give respect to our own languages.
Amish Tripathi
#44. Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.
J.A. Burrow
#45. As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
Dinaw Mengestu
#46. 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.
Aleksandar Hemon
#47. I will never go back. For the simple reason that all the Russia I need, after all, is with me
always with me. Her literature, her language, my own Russian childhood. I will never return, I will never surrender.
Vladimir Nabokov
#48. The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.
Etgar Keret
#49. Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs, riddles, or epics that are chanted.
F. Sionil Jose
#50. Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation.
Paul Valery
#51. Its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent
Mark O'Connell
#53. it is not the first language that is all-important, but which language captures the adolescent's imagination when he or she first discovers literature.
Ned Thomas
#54. It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
Lafcadio Hearn
#55. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.
Betsy Hearne
#56. 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.
Octavio Paz
#57. The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
Leslie Jamison
#58. The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.
Edwin Muir
#59. The time is ripe for young Indian authors writing in the English language.
Anurag Shourie
