Top 100 Quotes About Literal
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others.
Maggie Nelson
#5. I wasn't really naked. I simply didn't have any clothes on.
Josephine Baker
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. What on earth is the current morality, except in its literal sense - the morality that is always running away?
G.K. Chesterton
#10. 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
#11. Don't swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus.
John Green
#12. 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
#13. The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium.
Joseph Bologna
#14. 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
#15. The literal, basic thing of the stage is really like a magnet. It brings me back to earth.
Al Pacino
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Theodor Adorno
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.
John Thorn
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
John Shelby Spong
#32. 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
#33. When I went to high school in Australia, I was exposed to textbooks that outlined evolutionary ideas - such as ape-like creatures turning into people. I recognized the conflict between evolutionary ideas and a literal reading of the book of Genesis.
Ken Ham
#34. We all paint on a face to show the world," Nicholas replies philosophically. "For some of us, that's quite literal.
L. H. Cosway
#35. The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#36. You can't have whatever you want. But to a child who must ask permission for every single thing, adulthood looks like a constant parade of every desire's satisfaction. It is a heady and terrifying place. It is the Otherworld. It is Fairyland. In fantasy, we make this literal.
Catherynne M Valente
#37. I don't know why one can't chase two rabbits at the same time, even in the literal sense of those words. If you have the hounds, go ahead and pursue.
Anton Chekhov
#38. I think a really rich world to live in is where you're thinking in terms of human behavior and human types and not being super literal. In order to see the deeper truth, you need to break out of literal frame of mind.
Silas Weir Mitchell
#39. Individualism. Campbell said, "All religions are true in that the metaphor is true." I think this means that religions are meant to be literary maps, not literal doctrines, a signpost to the unknowable, a hymn to the inconceivable. Edward Slingerland is a professor
Russell Brand
#41. The Word of truth teaches in the clearest and most positive terms that all of the dead will be raised. No doctrine of the faith rests upon a more literal and emphatic body of Scripture authority than this, nor is any more vital to Christianity.
C.I. Scofield
#42. There is a straight-forward definition for 'Independent Filmmaking'. The term references a group of films that are financed by money that comes from outside the studio system. In a literal sense that is what it means.
Andrew Neel
#43. I think that 'Station to Station' is a nomadic project not only in a literal sense, as it's traveling by train from place to place. Some of these places are New York City or Los Angeles, but some of these places are rather off-the-grid places.
Doug Aitken
#44. All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.
Benjamin Jowett
#45. When expressing a regular character literal, you simply use single quotes: 'This is a regular character string literal'. When expressing a Unicode character literal, you need to specify the character N (for National) as a prefix: N'This is a Unicode character string literal'.
Itzik Ben-Gan
#46. I don't like literal spaces, I don't like literal anything. I still like some kind of guess work but some pieces work and they just pop.
Jason Shawn Alexander
#47. Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.
Jeff VanderMeer
#48. I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.
Danai Gurira
#49. You have to lead, in the case of a game show, a contestant through the architecture of the show. So there's a lot of rules there, literal and implied, that you have to navigate.
Michael Ian Black
#50. There is a twofold meaning in every creature, a literal and a mystical, and the one is but the ground of the other.
John Smith
#51. Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't.
Josiah Bartlett
#52. No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.
Bill Bryson
#53. As I got older, I had more experience with borders. Some literal - living in the dramatically blue misty mountains on the line between North Carolina and Tennessee, and living in California - home to expats, transplants, and refugees from both sides of innumerable borders.
Tim Pratt
#54. I figured it out this afternoon, when they let me take a walk around the grounds, that these cows are stupid. Bovine. I knew the word, but I hadn't quite appreciated how literal it could be. I
Jo Walton
#55. One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.
Julie Taymor
#56. Emotionally, I was affected a lot by Rage Against the Machine, not specifically the literal intention of the words or what it was about, but the feel, the sound, those phrases that got me.
Fred Durst
#57. I don't like my shoes,' said Rose.
'I'm wearing my shoes and you don't see me complain.'
'You only hear a person complain,' said Rose. 'Not see.'
How has Rose lived for seventeen years and no one has killed her, not once?
Franny Billingsley
#58. When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal.
J.J. Abrams
#59. I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.
Neko Case
#60. I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.
Bo Burnham
#61. Men aren't really complicated. They are very simple, literal creatures. They usually mean what they say. And we spend hours trying to analyze what they've said, when really it's obvious.
E.L. James
#62. I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.
Amanda Palmer
#63. We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.
Walter Kirn
#64. They say that you and your soul mate have a string connecting your hearts - not a literal string, but an invisible one.
Lily Paradis
#65. I believe the Scriptures teach that there's a literal heaven and a literal hell, just like Jesus said. And without forgiveness of sins that, yeah, the place of punishment is called hell.
Kirk Cameron
#66. If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself - reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination - it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its images of the good life.
Richard Kearney
#67. Praise is literal food for feminine qualities. If you want your woman to grow in her radiance health, happiness, love, beauty, power and depth, praise these qualities. Praise them daily. A number of times.
David Deida
#68. Are women literal creatures? I have to admit this is not my forte.
Alex Rosa
#69. In a literal sense, even a private company, of course, cannot do everything that it wants without some discussion with government. As a good corporate citizen, Severstal discussed the idea of a merger with Arcelor with the Russian government.
Alexei Mordashov
#70. It's natural to fear death, as a conscious, thinking being - it's the literal end of you. I'm not even afraid of death itself. It's more of a profound... not wanting to leave the party
EXO Books
#71. The one, more Latin, more Roman, closer to eloquence than to the literal word, aims at a certain effect, at magic. The other, more Greek, more Hellenistic, seeks transparency flowing from the source.
Therese De Lisieux
#72. Obviously the name of the show is a joke, a friend of mine gave it to me. But some people are very literal. Sometimes you see things like "He's not the smartest man in the world! All he does is drink." Well, they're not listening very closely.
Greg Proops
#73. The Scripture makes it clear that this planet would already be a literal hell on earth were it not for the presence of the Holy Spirit in the world.
Billy Graham
#74. More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth.
Rosalind E. Krauss
#75. Liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite there own.
Jonathan Haidt
#76. Breath does, in fact, connect us all in a very literal way. Take a breath now. And as you breathe, think about what is in your breath. There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you.
Jane Poynter
#77. The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
Christopher Hitchens
#78. Because of their excessive commitment to a literal Bible, fundamentalist Christians have fallen into the trap of biblioltry.
Mel White
#79. Things have to be believable, not in a literal, photographic sense, but in an emotional sense - capturing the essence of the situation.
Michael Foreman
#80. The devil, as a master of deceit, does everything he can to keep people from believing in the existence of a hell; but hell is a literal state of existence that will be the plight of all those who reject the Lord Jesus Christ.
Tim LaHaye
#81. That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
Walter Pater
#82. I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.
Anselm Kiefer
#83. Isabel smiled. She liked a conversation that went in odd directions; she liked the idea of playfulness in speech. People could be so depressingly literal. Jamie
Alexander McCall Smith
#84. It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.
Douglas Trumbull
#85. I was simply in love with my daughter and how she viewed her world. The literal way in which she took it all in and took it on. I knew it wouldn't last long and so I treasured every moment I saw and heard of it.
Michael Connelly
#86. When the only rule is there are no rules becomes literal, we'll all become illiterate and unable to offend one another at all.
Brian Spellman
#88. Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.
Terry Teachout
#89. The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.
Albert Camus
#90. Departure from the literal aspect, rather than mechanical exactness, is the code of the true artist. However, departures are the result of studied intent rather than inability.
Edgar Alwin Payne
#91. My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval; to inform.
Michael Hayden
#92. with forefinger wagging, explained that he was an artist and that his tales should not be seen as literal constructs but as imaginative re-creations, truer than the truth, and
Neil Gaiman
#93. Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don't mean to be too literal about this.
Nora Ephron
#94. If you ever make anything too literal you might as well forget it. It loses everything.
Gillian Wearing
#95. The only pleasing thing in life is pain. Pain creates pleasure, but not in the literal way.
Mia P
#96. God truly is our Father, the Father of the spirits of all mankind. We are his literal offspring and are formed in his image. We have inherited divine characteristics from him.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#97. To have deep roots in a place means having dead buried there. It is almost that literal, the dead forming your bond to the earth and to the others whose dead lie buried there. I always had that bond whether I knew it or not.
Julene Bair
#98. The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.
Christine Jennings
#99. One writes what one lives, even if not in a literal way. Someone who has gone through an unhappy love tends to describe unhappy loves, even if they have nothing to do with their own.
Dacia Maraini
#100. I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.
Edward Gorey
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