Quotes About Life From Literature

#1. It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

John Banville

#2. That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!

Connie Willis

#3. There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male ... The other voice, the one I had from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.

Walter Dean Myers

#4. But ignorance of divine revelation affects all of thought and life, from one's view toward history and philosophy, to one's interpretation of music and literature, to one's understanding of mathematics and physics.

Vincent Cheung

#5. The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and boldly at life, and write about real flesh and blood. It is high time for a brand-new arena for literature, high time for some bold fighters to charge headlong into battle!

Lu Xun

#6. 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

#7. The passion to teach, to share deeply
experienced "lessons from life," is embedded in all literature.

Vera B. Williams

#8. the whole point of literature, I think, is that it's the best technology we have for communicating what another person's life feels like from the inside.

Garth Greenwell

#9. 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

#10. The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.

Alaa Al Aswany

#11. No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.

Northrop Frye

#12. I'm planting a tree to teach me to gather strength from my deepest roots.

Andrea Koehle Jones

#13. 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

#14. While in some countries there's a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India - in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God.

Amish Tripathi

#15. 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

#16. For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

Yukio Mishima

#17. Ignoring somebody's mistakes in life from a powerful position makes you a saint, but the same act (whose intention
does not matter), if carried out from a weak position, will make you a coward or helpless.

Ravindra Shukla

#18. '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

#19. I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.

Gunter Grass

#20. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that 'words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.' That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.
p.20

Nina Sankovitch

#21. The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

Jean-Luc Godard

#22. The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory of others; it is a new life that we acquire, which becomes as precious to us as the one we received from Heaven.

Montesquieu

#23. I have a very ecumenical faith. I have a very inclusive faith. There's a quote I love from recovery literature that says, "The realm of the spirit is roomy and broad. It is open to all." I've absolutely staked my life on that.

Ashley Judd

#24. Internationalism on the other hand admits that spiritual achievements have their roots deep in national life; from this national consciousness art and literature derive their character and strength and on it even many of the humanistic sciences are firmly based.

Christian Lous Lange

#25. Everybody knows, nobody's talking - from LIE
debut novel coming September 1st from St. Martin's Press

Caroline Bock

#26. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Henry David Thoreau

#27. To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

David McCullough

#28. Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.

Meridel Le Sueur

#29. It's a lucky man who leaves early from life's banquet, before he's drained to the dregs his goblet - full of wine; yes, it's a lucky man who has not read life's novel to the end, but has been wise enough to part with it abruptly - like me with my Onegin.

Alexander Pushkin

#30. All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most ... .

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#31. Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off from the rest of life. No - I want to always have a foot in the street, to be inmersed in the activities of my contemporaries, in the times, in the place where I live.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#32. This is the difference between U.S. Latina/o letters and Latina/o Letters from Latin America: In the United States, writing is a business. In Latin America, writing is life and death.

Daniel Pena

#33. 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

#34. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)

Emma Thompson

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

F. Sionil Jose

#39. You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.

Sophocles

#40. And I wondered if that was the problem with literature - it made sense only in theoretical situations and didn't often help in real life, where it took a hell of a lot more courage to live than to turn pages all alone, hidden away from the world in a corner or a bed or under a tree.

Matthew Quick

#41. 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

#42. Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. The Meadow ... Only one of them succeeded in making a life here ... He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in.

James Galvin

#47. Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.

Maria Edgeworth

#48. The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct.

John Lancaster Spalding

#49. 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

#50. To be a good writer, become a good listener.

Cynthia Briggs

#51. "Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.

Alice McDermott

#52. We dreamt of a crappy apartment somewhere
Making love while we let the midnight air
Flow through the open window, into our closed hearts
Left bitter from heartbreak and too much time apart

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

#53. 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

#54. The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. Our real power in life comes from our true thinking!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#58. 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

#59. Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.

Sean O'Casey

#60. To recount modern life one has to have characters with iPads and smart phones who take trains and planes, and to be aware how this alters consciousness, identity, and the kind of experiences people have. They are constantly exposed to contact from everyone they know and many they don't.

Tim Parks

#61. 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

#62. I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

Alan Bennett