Meaning In Literature Quotes

#1. Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.

Dejan Stojanovic

#2. No work of literature is the product of only one or two conscious ideas. A story is mysteriously dense of meaning.

Carol Bly

#3. Into the day as by dream I swim
To the music of nourished meaning.

Dejan Stojanovic

#4. Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities

William T. Vollmann

#5. Literature is language charged with meaning

Ezra Pound

#6. Those who read the Scriptures as magnificent literature, breath-taking poetry, or history and overlook the story of salvation miss the Bible's real meaning and message.

Billy Graham

#7. '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

#8. It often is better to ask an ancient Hebrew goatherd, instead of a so-called expert like myself, about the meaning of a particular, biblical story.

Richard Gist

#9. He [an earnest young reporter] seemed to share the view of many intelligent, well-educated, well-meaning people that, while adult literature may aim to be art, the object of children's books is to whip the little rascals into shape.

Katherine Paterson

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.

David Christian

#13. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.

Henry David Thoreau

#14. I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.

Nicole Krauss

#15. 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

#16. Life really is a story, and every story comes to an end. At the same time, it seems we all leave in the middle of our own stories. It's who we become that gives the story body, form and meaning.

Melinda West Seifert

#17. Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "... a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution?

William K. Wimsatt

#18. I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

Robert Dessaix

#19. At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

Alberto Manguel

#20. 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

#21. I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Northrop Frye

#22. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.

G.K. Chesterton

#23. 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

#24. We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

George Eliot

#25. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Ezra Pound

#26. Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.

Alex Tabarrok

#27. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

Vladimir Nabokov

#28. Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Herbert Gold

#29. For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.

Richard T. Nash

#30. Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects.

Dejan Stojanovic

#31. A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.

Benjamin Moser

#32. A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Italo Calvino

#33. I think that absurdity in literature looks into a lack of meaning in some important and fundamental way. It allows us to ask questions in ways that other forms can't, or in ways we can't using solely traditional means.

Laurie Foos

#34. I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.

Emily Dickinson

#35. She liked getting hold of some book ... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.

Virginia Woolf

#36. You can see the meaning of the statement that "Literature is a living art" most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes - say Pure Mathematics and Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

#37. Although I think the word "pleasure" is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa