Top 45 Words Literary Quotes
#1. as the descendants of the Normans finally amalgamated with the English natives, the Anglo-Saxon language reasserted itself; but in its poverty it had to borrow hundreds of French words (literary, intellectual, and cultural) before it could become the language of literature.
Richard A. LaFleur
#2. There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.
Christopher Hitchens
#3. Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
Chinua Achebe
#4. Always" and "never" are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove that it's not.
Thomas C. Foster
#5. Here's to the future, he said and lifted the glass to his mouth. There was a lump of regret stuck in his throat as he spoke the words, but he washed it down with the whiskey.
Bette Lee Crosby
#6. It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.
William Moulton Marston
#7. By deciding what is, and is not, allowed to be discussed in a review,
by removing discussion of social context, and saying that only the
words on the page count, Goodreads is ignoring fifty years of development
of literary criticism, and is engaging in censorship.
G.R. Reader
#8. The sexual contact before this?
"It was the first time."
The woman looked at Rat again, harder. The silence was more painful than the words. What she had just heard went beyond plain immorality. It was ridiculous.
Graham Spaid
#9. It is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I've learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the 'grammelot.'
Dario Fo
#11. Give me a literary love that doesn't need words, that flows like silent water and speaks to the bone. There I lose myself in the fantasy.
Julie Harvey Delcourt
#12. Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.
James Lee Burke
#13. He searched his mind for something more to say, something to take away her pain, but he could find nothing. There were no words to ease such a pain. He knew because the ache in his heart was as great as hers.
Bette Lee Crosby
#14. If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
Aaron Copland
#15. Church words are easy to say, but they're not so easy to live by.
Bette Lee Crosby
#16. In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
Northrop Frye
#17. A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#18. A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#19. To be a great writer you must be fearless with your words.
Karmel Graham
#20. For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful.
Os Guinness
#21. Real people are made out of a whole lot of things - flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.
Thomas C. Foster
#22. Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!
August Wilson
#23. I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.
James Agee
#24. I write across several genres. I'm a slut for words. I can't keep it in my literary pants.
Fierce Dolan
#25. Let the enemy fall by their swords. Words not worth reading die their own death. But our Words will be Told!
K.A. Gunn
#26. We who have seen the truth will reshape the world, and Ireland shall be our entrance to this world beyond words.
Orna Ross
#27. I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.
Woodrow Wilson
#28. I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.
Camilla Lackberg
#29. Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
Philip Zaleski
#30. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.
Robert Cormier
#31. When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.
David McCullough
#32. In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.
Bharati Mukherjee
#33. Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
Roy Blount Jr.
#34. Words - I wonder if you can realize how much I love them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas and people to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary mind.
Aldous Huxley
#35. It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable.
Vanna Bonta
#36. A poem is a small machine made of words ... Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
William Carlos Williams
#37. Bearing witness from the sides of the room, ten or more lepers shouted at the bizarre scene, "Diable! Diable!" And then chants of some sort, or prayers, followed by more shouts of "Diable!" They were hurling these words at Moreau like stones.
Cole Alpaugh
#38. Write for joy. It is the *only* reason to write. Whatever happens to your books afterward, just write for joy. Send your current one out when it's done and forget it, start another, and keep on writing for joy. Words I now live by. Welwyn Wilton Katz
Welwyn Wilton Katz
#39. Oh, princes thrive on caviar, the poor on whey and curds, / And politicians, I infer, must eat their windy words. / It's crusts that feed the virtuous, it's cake that comforts sinners, / But writers live on bread and praise at Literary Dinners.
Phyllis McGinley
#40. Here's the important lesson in electronic journalism: it's not the literary value of the words - it's the tone of the sportscaster's voice
Bob Wolff
#41. Can a literary character be said to live a life from birth to death or otherwise to undergo a development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of a book, trapped forever in the same few words and actions-the very opposite of a living, developing human being?
Jack Miles
#42. It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself
rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#43. The word and the image mutually excluded each other. Joseph was a literary man to his very marrow; he put faith in the invisible Word; it was the most miraculous thing in all the world; though without form it had more power than anything endowed with form
Lion Feuchtwanger
#44. The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.
Robert McKee
#45. What were you doing all those years, after you disappeared?' Doug paused, unsure of his words. 'After she died.'
Grace looked at the grave across the space she had been too weak to cross. 'I was learning to make music.
Abigail Easton
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