Non Literal Quotes

#1. I hated it when literally was used for non-literal things. I popped the tab on my soda can and returned her grin. Over my dead body ... literally.

Tarryn Fisher

#2. I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories.

John Shelby Spong

#3. Glamour is a beautiful illusion - the word 'glamour' originally meant a literal magic spell - that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell.

Virginia Postrel

#4. Have you lost your mind?"
"No," I say, insulted. Well, I actually have lost some of my right mind, but now's probably not the best time to be literal.

Lisa Genova

#5. In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

David Byrne

#6. The murky gray light of incipient dawn was cold not only in the poetical sense but also in a very literal way - and

Isaac Asimov

#7. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

Theodor Adorno

#8. I'm a big fan of Edouard Vuillard, so I'd like anything by him - particularly a painting called 'Madame Hessel on the Sofa.' His work is realistic without being literal: I can really imagine what Madame Hessel is thinking.

Lesley Manville

#9. It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

Uta Hagen

#10. The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

George Saunders

#11. This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.

John Thorn

#12. Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

China Mieville

#13. What did the mat say to the door? You must be really aDOORable to open up to everyone who knock at you. And I welcome everyone and what do I get? People stepping all over me

Ana Claudia Antunes

#14. I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

John Searle

#15. How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.

Vincent Van Gogh

#16. In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.

Vladimir Nabokov

#17. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

John Shelby Spong

#18. Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation.

David Foster Wallace

#19. In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense.

Tim O'Brien

#20. The literal, basic thing of the stage is really like a magnet. It brings me back to earth.

Al Pacino

#21. Rosamond, what are you doing here?"
"You invited me for the weekend, don't you remember?"
"But how could you be so cruelly literal, darling?

Stephen Tennant

#22. The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium.

Joseph Bologna

#23. Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it.

Jeffrey Tayler

#24. Don't swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus.

John Green

#25. Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

Vladimir Nabokov

#26. What on earth is the current morality, except in its literal sense - the morality that is always running away?

G.K. Chesterton

#27. Most times when people pitch you as being perfect for a part ... they don't look at you as an actor who can transform. A lot of people are so literal.

Catherine Keener

#28. An aspect of the work has to do with altering the literal/cultural meaning of existing public images by making minimal changes and additions. Using superimposition, juxtaposition and other contextual changes, I am functioning as a visual guerrilla.

Robert Heinecken

#29. Film in many ways is very literal.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#30. I wasn't really naked. I simply didn't have any clothes on.

Josephine Baker

#31. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others.

Maggie Nelson

#32. Once we got closer to the origins of these Eastern practices, we found that the monks and swamis were just as dogmatic and paternalistic, just as literal and conservative in their approach to spirituality as the Christian priests and ministers we were trying to get away from.

Gudjon Bergmann

#33. A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Stephen King

#34. A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.

Matt Berninger