Top 100 Literature Is Life Quotes
#2. 'Religion,' I should note, has a disputed etymology in Latin: some say it's from 'relegere,' meaning 'to reread', while others say it's from religare, meaning 'to connect' or 'link.' Literature is life's fastener.
Joshua Cohen
#4. 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. There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen
Jessica-Lynn Barbour
#6. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it ... we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#9. In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.
Robert Aris Willmott
#10. Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller
#11. Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#12. Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one.
Minae Mizumura
#13. What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?
Jeanette Winterson
#14. The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
Charles Horton Cooley
#15. 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
#17. The difference between an achiever and a loser is,
An achiever never gives up, never settles and lastly never forgets.
Akash Lakhotia
#18. Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
Abraham Verghese
#19. 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
#20. He yelled, Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.
Saul Bellow
#21. The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.
V.S. Pritchett
#22. Most important thing in life is family,
Without them you are nothing.
Whatever you do will be worth nothing,
If there is no one to appreciate it.
Akash Lakhotia
#23. 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
#24. I will never see the day where I choose to fall upon my own sword of refuge. In knowing this, I also know that you will never ultimately defeat me; for my life is my own, and I will see to it accordingly.
Danish Sayanee
#25. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.
Tom Spanbauer
#27. Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.
Paul Murray
#28. Climbing Jacob's Ladder is a gutsy, glowing account of one man's encounter with a potent spiritual practice and how it transformed his life. This is a precious book - that rare combination of solid wisdom and good literature.
Larry Dossey
#29. Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
Barry Commoner
#30. Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
Karen Thompson Walker
#31. Half the time, in this life, you wouldn't know where you are nor when. There are moments of unpleasant liveliness. Tamp that the fuck down is best.
Kevin Barry
#32. 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
#33. You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.
T.C. Boyle
#34. Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#36. To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.
George Steiner
#37. 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
#38. If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.
Maria Kodama
#39. Without people coming in to our lives we never evolve, we just remain stagnant. Surely there is more to life than standing still whilst letting it pass you by. What's even worse, is living a life pretending to be someone, or something that you believe others want you to be.
Skye High
#40. Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf
#41. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.
Henry David Thoreau
#42. A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first.
Lizette Woodworth Reese
#43. 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
#44. 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,
#45. We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around which we once found safe haven. The book is the Light and the Life.
Mark Cantrell
#46. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
#47. From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Oscar Wilde
#48. Sometimes you have to succeed to see that there is nothing awesome in the thing which will be achieved!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#49. 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
#50. Life on
Life on the reservation
Life on the reservation is dirty
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy dogs.
(Dena Colhoff, student)
Timothy P. McLaughlin
#51. Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
Charles Frahman
#52. Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.
Jeanette Winterson
#53. 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
#54. Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
Tom Rachman
#55. If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.
Steven Pinker
#56. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#57. I seem to hear thousands of voices
the voices of the common folk in the marketplace
urging me to go forward and do what must be done. More is at stake now than my life. On me turns the future of the warriors. Let's not quibble longer, lest this rare opportunity slip through my fingers.
Eiji Yoshikawa
#58. 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
#59. Psychology, unlike chemistry, unlike algebra, unlike literature, is an owner's manual for your own mind. It's a guide to life. What could be more important than grounding young people in the scientific information that they need to live happy, healthy, productive lives? To have good relationships?
Daniel Goldstein
#60. Any experience, which is not written, will be lost in time. Rich literature is lost forever.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#61. For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
Yukio Mishima
#62. Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Francoise Sagan
#63. 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
#64. This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.
F.L. Lucas
#65. 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.
Susan Sontag
#66. Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.
Robert Dessaix
#67. Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on ... Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor
James W. Sire
#69. As I think about anyone or anything
whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film
as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?
June Jordan
#70. Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
Jorge Luis Borges
#71. To be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.
Ellen Glasgow
#74. Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
Terence McKenna
#75. Nothing in life comes easy and without a price. The trick is learning to never give up.
Michael Alexander Beas
#76. Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.
Amy Lowell
#77. Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like.
Christina Westover
#78. Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.
Jamie L. Harding
#79. There is always the question why
And there is always life,
Which doesn't need an answer.
Dejan Stojanovic
#80. 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
#82. The Bohemian who tires of life, who gives up by retirement into insamity or suicide, is not necessarily one who had failed in what he wants to express.
Emily Hahn
#83. I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.
Wilbur Smith
#84. 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
#85. Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story - or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall - is, Is it dead or alive?
Mavis Gallant
#86. Now, I can smile at the stock quality of these friends, these uniforms. these looking-glasses, these sharers. Each is a character lifted straight from literature and yet, life successfully aping art, they are alive, and fulfil their destinies - or act their parts - flawlessly.
Hal Porter
#87. 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
#88. No matter what is happening in life or in the world - war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones - if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.
Karen DeCrow
#89. Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.
Elliot Ackerman
#90. The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#91. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Fernando Pessoa
#93. Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out ...
Ben Marcus
#94. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)
Rabih Alameddine
#95. Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there's always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.
Albert Camus
#96. 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
#97. With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.
Cynthia Ozick
#98. The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
Marcel Proust
#99. It is the life in literature that acts upon life.
J.G. Holland
#100. The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life whichdoes not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.
Robert Benchley
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