Literal Quotes

I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. And it was way to literal for me.
Mitch Hedberg

Once, Lift, Forks

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
Voltaire

Life, Word, Spirit

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

Life, Beauty, Children

The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.
Jacques Yves Cousteau

Great, Hope, Before

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
Karl Marx

Society, Political, Human

Enthusiasm is the energy and force that builds literal momentum of the human soul and mind.
Bryant H. McGill

Mind, Human, Soul

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

Society, Self, Sense

I do not consider myself a literal genius.
Lil Wayne

Genius, Consider

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

Words, Against, Sound

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.
Keanu Reeves

Movies, Light, Talk

Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.
Toni Morrison

Single, Problems, Sense

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.
Noam Chomsky

Freedom, Society, Justice

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
Nate Silver

Acting, Sense, Between

Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.
Jon Meacham

Often, Read, Press

There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
Junot Diaz

Character, Writing, Person

I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them.
Matthew Barney

Car, Sometimes, Often

I think people's perception of a rich girl is literal, but metaphorically I embrace it as being rich in love, spirit, joy and religion. So it's not about money.
Angie Stone

Love, Religion, Money

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

Work, Real, Become

Watch the History Channel if you want it literal and historically perfect.
Emily Blunt

History, Perfect, Watch

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.
Robert Smithson

Between, Language, Operates

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

Family, Home, Pain

Movies are too literal.
E. L. Doctorow

I enjoy every climb - maybe it's because it's a literal dance between life and death.
Alain Robert

Life, Death, Enjoy

If it's just screaming - and I know this sounds so ridiculous - that gets old. But sometimes when there's literal chaos, it's like being in a war zone, and that's kind of exciting. You're just running through the crowd of people chasing after you and no one knows what's going on.
Robert Pattinson

War, Through, After

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

Life, Poetry, Him

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.
Karen Russell

Work, Character, Down

When a middle-aged man says in a moment of weariness that he is half dead, he is telling the literal truth.
Elmer Davis

Truth, Moment, Dead

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.
Jacques Barzun

Others, Around, Sense

People ask me about 'The Hurt Locker' a lot, and it's an incredible piece of filmmaking - as are 'Band of Brothers' and 'Platoon' and 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Apocalypse Now.' But they're not necessarily true to war in a literal sense. What they are, really, are brilliant movies about Hollywood's idea of war.
Sebastian Junger

War, Movies, Hurt

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

True, Sense, Fact

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