138 Literary Love Quotes

Following is our list of literary love quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about love literature.

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Famous Literary Love Quotes

Love, that is day and night - love, that is sun and moon and stars, Love, that is crimson, sumptuous, sick with perfume, no other words but words of love, no other thought but love. — Walt Whitman

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant. — Edna Ferber

Love is the poetry of the senses. — Unknown

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. — Stephen Stills

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other. — Siri Hustvedt

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death. — Edna Ferber

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! — D. H. Lawrence

No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life. — Laura Esquivel

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch

writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind. — Alice Childress

Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis

We loved with a love that was more than love. - Edgar Allan Poe

We loved with a love that was more than love. — Edgar Allan Poe

Literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts. — Cam'ron

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for. — Ray Bradbury

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. - H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. — H. L. Mencken

Short Literary Love Quotes

  • Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
  • A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. — Maurice Sendak
  • At the touch of love, everyone is a poet. — Plato
  • At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. — Plato
  • There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature. — P. G. Wodehouse
  • Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence. — Virginia Woolf
  • More than kisses, letters mingle souls. — John Donne
  • The crown of literature is poetry. — W. Somerset Maugham

Literary Love Image Quotes

Literary love quote Your mind will always believe everything you tell it. Feed it hope. Feed it truth. Feed it with love
Your mind will always believe everything you tell it. Feed it hope. Feed it truth. Feed it with love.

Love Quotes

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life. — Kahlil Gibran

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affectionBuddha

If you judge people, you have no time to love them. - Mother Theresa

If you judge people, you have no time to love them. — Mother Theresa

Literary love quote The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measur
The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. — Lao Tzu

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless. — G. K. Chesterton

I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. - Roy Croft

I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. — Roy Croft

Literary love quote Everyone comes with baggage. Find someone who loves you enough to help you unpack.
Everyone comes with baggage. Find someone who loves you enough to help you unpack.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. — Albert Schweitzer

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. - William Shakespeare

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. — William Shakespeare

Love, friendship, laughter... Some of the best things in life really are free. - Bob Marley

Love, friendship, laughter... Some of the best things in life really are free. — Bob Marley

If you love somebody, let them go. If they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were. — Anonymous

Love Literature Quotes

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. — B. F. Skinner

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. — Roald Dahl

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars. — David Guterson

Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence. - Carl Sandburg

Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence. — Carl Sandburg

People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation. - Elias Canetti

People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation. — Elias Canetti

Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country. — Karl Philipp Moritz

Literary love quote How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.
How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.

There's no love more intense than the love we have for our kids - and where there is intense love, there is also intense fear lurking beneath the surface. — Arianna Huffington

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy — Jane Austen

It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son. — Horatius Bonar

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand. — Margery Williams

Love Poetry Quotes

Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that! It lights up the whole sky. — Unknown Author

We were together. I forget the rest. - Walt Whitman

We were together. I forget the rest. — Walt Whitman

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything. — David Bowie

Literary love quote If I cut you off chances are you handed me the scissors.
If I cut you off chances are you handed me the scissors.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring. — Oscar Wilde

Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy. — Nizar Qabbani

What is Music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love! Music is the Sister of Poetry and her Mother is sorrow! — Sergei Rachmaninoff

Literary love quote To love a person is to see all of their magic, and to remind them of it when they have forgotten.
To love a person is to see all of their magic, and to remind them of it when they have forgotten.

To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown. — Robert Bly

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. - Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. — Emily Dickinson

I give you my hand, I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? — Walt Whitman

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love — Leonard Cohen

Literary Art Quotes

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. — Russell Kirk

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two. — Will Eisner

Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it — Mark Twain

Literary love quote Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic.
Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic.

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art — Seamus Heaney

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth. — William Saroyan

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. — George Orwell

Literary love quote I hope to arrive to my death, late, in love and a little drunk.
I hope to arrive to my death, late, in love and a little drunk.

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself. — Robertson Davies

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. — Walter Pater

The delight we experience when we allow ourselves to respond to a fairy tale, the enchantment we feel, comes not from the psychological meaning of the tale (although this contributes to it) but from its literary qualities-the tale itself as a work of art. — Bruno Bettelheim

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Love Novels Quotes

If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear! — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you. — Steven Strogatz

I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Literary love quote The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting
The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel. — John Dalton

I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous. — Patrick Marber

Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page. — Sidney Sheldon

Literary love quote Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself. — Patricia Highsmith

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. — Lorrie Moore

Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics. — Jerome K. Jerome

Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States. — Terry Southern

Literary Quotes

If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us. — Franz Kafka

What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. — Joseph Pulitzer

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. — Anais Nin

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. - Samuel Johnson

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. — Samuel Johnson

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes V. Jensen

Literary love quote A strong person loves, forgives, walks away, lets go, tries again, perseveres... No matter what life
A strong person loves, forgives, walks away, lets go, tries again, perseveres... No matter what life throws at them.

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives. — Kathy Acker

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan

Love Poems Quotes

Listen with your heart, you will understand. — Pocahontas

Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem. — Walt Whitman

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls . — Merce Cunningham

I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark. — Andrea Gibson

See the mountains kiss high Heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea - What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

One man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face. — William Butler Yeats

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. — William Penn

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

For those who love... time is eternity. — Henry Van Dyke

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep... — Robert Frost

People Writing About Literary Love

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Read quotes by Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber
quotes on education, love and order

97 970
Read quotes by Plato

Plato
quotes on life, love and reality

945 13426
Read quotes by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman
quotes on love, life and nature

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Read quotes by Unknown

Unknown
quotes on life, gratitude and happiness

1801 14881
Read quotes by Stephen Stills

Stephen Stills
quotes on life, love and slavery

25 201
Read quotes by Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt
quotes on friendship, life and love

66 131

More Literary Love Quotes

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Paglia

Each time you happen to me all over again. — Edith Wharton

So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure. — Edmund White

To Grandma: Once upon a time, there was a boy who flew. — Chris Colfer

Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all. — Jennifer Worth

I took a photo of us, mid-embrace. When I am old and alone I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful. — Joe Dunthorne

People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip. — Lorrie Moore

To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. — Victor Hugo

True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love. — David O. Mckay

Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days. — Stephen Fry

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography. — Germaine Greer

Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related. — Heinrich Heine

Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. — C. S. Lewis

I love lyrics. I've always been averse to the straight lyric idea. I guess a big part of it is, that songs that are literary always turn me off. Because they feel so abstract. Like a song. What is a song? We have to remember what the function of a concert and the function of playing a song for people are. It's all become really abstracted. — Ian Svenonius

Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. — Emily Bronte

If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it. — Nicole Krauss

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story. — J. K. Rowling

... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured. — Virginia Woolf

Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living. — George Eliot

A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil. — Christopher Hitchens

The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward. — Edward Abbey

When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different. — Cormac McCarthy

If readers like The Thorn and the Blossom, which I would call literary fantasy, I think they would like books such as Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love, Catherynne Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen. — Theodora Goss

What's fascinating is where they come from in the world. People in Bangladesh, a chap in a fire-base in Tikrit in Iraq. Chap in an Irish pub in Dublin. And lovely to think this literary network - or rather network of readers - is well spread out. — John Gimlette

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake. — Nancy Pearcey

If she did experience sex-or something close to it-in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity. — Haruki Murakami

I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find. — Anne Lamott

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers — Philip K. Dick

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Anna Paglia

I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation. — Trevor Dunn

When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do. — Jonathan Carroll

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could! — Brian Lumley

I also encourage my students to read literary criticism that is deeply personal yet formally inventive and intellectually expansive... books that offer unorthodox ways of doing double duty as literary criticism and as love letters to the power of literature per se. — Rob Nixon

I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all. — Megan Chance

I would tell myself to get more sleep! Believe it or not, I wrote the book while finishing my PhD in English literature. It was wonderful to get away from doing literary scholarship by writing this mythical love story. I think so much of my own love for books and scholarship comes through in The Thorn and the Blossom. — Theodora Goss

I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer. — Joyce Carol Oates

From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences. — Greta Salpeter

I think I'm up for not trying to play a literary heroine. I think I'd rather just do someone that has just been created in a script, rather than in a book that everyone knows and loves. The difficulty with it and the reason these characters are so loved is that every woman and man that reads it understands it in a different way. They're so relatable, but different aspects will be drawn from different people. — Lily James

I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in. — Porochista Khakpour

When I became a poet, the Korean literary world expected women poets to sing passively of love. Naturally, this was not written anywhere, but this rule existed nonetheless. Consequently, I received plenty of serious criticism. — Kim Hyesoon

If Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake had a literary love child, he would be Timothy Hallinan. — Julia Spencer-Fleming

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