Quotes About Life In Literature

#1. To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

Northrop Frye

#2. 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

#3. It is the life in literature that acts upon life.

J.G. Holland

#4. By the time we were knit in our mothers' wombs, our lives were like open books before Him
every sentence read, every paragraph indented, every chapter titled, every page numbered. He knew it all in advance
all the sin, all the selfishness, every weakness. Yet He chose to love us
lavishly.

Beth Moore

#5. In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.

R.M. Engelhardt

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.

Jamie L. Harding

#9. 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

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

F. Sionil Jose

#11. I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on 'Ilustrado.'

Miguel Syjuco

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.

Pat Conroy

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Simple things relieve eyes; simple things ease mind, simple things create meditation, simple things are simply miraculous!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#19. 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

#20. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.

Henry David Thoreau

#21. I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.

Dorothy Allison

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

Margaret Fuller

#27. 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

#28. Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

Katherine Paterson

#29. Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

Ada Leverson

#30. Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

Jorge Luis Borges

#31. If literature or music can make you think or become aware, then it's done something. That's what we've always wanted to do, just ignite sparks in people's minds. We can't offer a manifesto of how to make your life better.

Nicky Wire

#32. "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

#33. I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living.

Rosecrans Baldwin

#34. Nothing in life comes easy and without a price. The trick is learning to never give up.

Michael Alexander Beas

#35. I want to
peel away all the labels
I had once given to others
and place them
upon the fabric
of my own identity.

They have reflected back to me,
everything that I refuse
to See in myself.

Meraaqi

#36. 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

#37. I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

Mohsin Hamid

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him.

Madeleine L'Engle

#41. I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life.

Tom Stoppard

#42. The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.

James A. Michener

#43. When you are falling short in vocabulary to explain the emotion in your story.Than you are writing the right story

Tushar Upreti

#44. Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

C.S. Lewis

#45. There are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.

Daphne Kalotay

#46. It is not the jumps you made in your life but mostly the jumps you haven't made are the real source of regrets in your life!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#47. Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace.

Duff Cooper

#48. It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

Arthur Miller

#49. 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

#50. With 'Ilustrado,' I set out to change the way we read literature, and I think I failed spectacularly. In fact, I know I failed. In reaching further than I could, I may not have produced a life- or literature-changing book, but I did produce one I am proud of.

Miguel Syjuco

#51. Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.

Ben Okri

#52. The mind can also be kind and does blot out those episodes of our existence that we can't erase in our consciousness.

F. Sionil Jose

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

Vera B. Williams

#54. The members of the Guild of Assassins considered themselves cultured men who enjoyed good music and food and literature. And they knew the value of human life. To a penny, in many cases.

Terry Pratchett

#55. I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.

James Branch Cabell

#56. 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

#57. Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.

Philip Larkin

#58. 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

#59. There have been so many instances in my life where movies, music, or literature has made my life tangibly better.

James Ponsoldt

#60. How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.

Nadeem Aslam

#61. If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.

Annie Dillard

#62. This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

Michael Ondaatje

#63. I like presenting ambiguous situations. It seems to me a great part of our inner and outer lives are ambiguous, if we're honest about it. Maybe I'm a realist, in that respect.

Eric Basso

#64. A good book is an event in my life.

Stendhal

#65. A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

Karen Thompson Walker

#66. I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable
the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.

Peter Greenaway

#67. If you're going to give up so quickly, I don't think you'll last long but you should try telling yourself you won't ever give up. Nobody can say how this will turn out but you should try the hardest you've ever tried in your life so you'll have no regrets

Hitori Nakano

#68. The best books - like the best music or television or movies or comics or video games - can challenge us and force us to think or perceive aspects of life that we may prefer to avoid. In a sense, they threaten us.

Geoffrey Reiter

#69. If you can change the way you think in time you will notice a change in your heart and also a change in your life and the way you see things.

The Prolific Penman

#70. How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!

John Wain

#71. Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#72. The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.

Naguib Mahfouz

#73. I completely believe that - literature for me is a way of life. That's probably true of all writers or all artists. I think in the end this kind of activity absorbs one in such a way that it becomes one's way of life.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#74. I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.

Pat Conroy

#75. If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

Elif Batuman

#76. In literature and in life we ultimately pursue, not conclusions, but beginnings.

Sam Tanenhaus

#77. Apparently, faith in life is one thing and faith in literature is another.

Gerald Weaver

#78. Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

Aristotle.

#79. For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta stone of literature.

Anna Quindlen

#80. 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

#81. All the books have it ... That time when you don't know where you'll be, but you can't stay as you are. In life or in literature, that time rarely feels good.

Katherine Reay

#82. Poison or elixir, narcotic or aphrodisiac, whatever it was, this flower, relic of a day in the life of an accidental writer, an inadvertent counterfeiter leaving his traces in code, the birds were coming to try it, performing a dance for no one and flying up toward the moon.

Cesar Aira

#83. 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

#84. At one point in my life, I wanted to do a master's degree in Irish literature, but I ended up getting pregnant instead.

Miriam Toews

#85. When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.

Frederick Sanger

#86. If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make life richer and happier. In my youth I steeled myself against them and thought them so much waste.

Charles Darwin

#87. Not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#88. Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

Matthew Specktor

#89. That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

Aldous Huxley

#90. Writing is a bittersweet addiction. The more it drains you; the more replenished you feel, and you crave it even more.

Anthea Syrokou

#91. In order to have a literature, a nation must live, not merely on the practical, but on the moral and spiritual plane as well, contributing through its national life to the development of some side of the universal spirit of man.

Vissarion Belinsky

#92. Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

Franz Grillparzer

#93. Nothing becomes reality in the political life of a nation that was not present in its literature as spirit.

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

#94. The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you.

A.K. Kuykendall

#95. 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

#96. In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now ?

Dana Gioia

#97. There will always be road construction in life, and never a point when all the highways are fixed. Keep walking.

R.S. Vern

#98. We read literature for a number of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and - especially important - to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others.

Maureen Corrigan

#99. Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

Heinrich Boll

#100. In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

Mario Vargas-Llosa