Literally Quotes

1. "If watching your child die is a parent's worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead... Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us."
Author: Ann Hood

2. "Kyle had gone from confused and possibly hurt to a card-carrying member of PFLAG. Literally; he'd shown Brad the card the other day."
Author: Anne Tenino

3. "[in regards to his mom and her new boyfriend]At least they never do it while I'm in the house, because that would make me quite literally barf my lentils."
Author: Anthony McGowan

4. "My most noticeable physical trait is, hands down, my hair. It's big, unruly and curly, and you can spot it from a mile away... literally."
Author: Becca Fitzpatrick

5. "I don't do filler songs. I don't get them. They don't make any sense to me. Why would I literally waste my time on a song that doesn't hold up to the same standards as the other songs on the album? I won't play it live."
Author: Betty Who

6. "We speak often, and sentimentally, of being 'enchanted' by the natural world. But what if it's the other way around? What if we are enchanted, literally, by the human world we live in? That seems entirely more likely - that the consumer world amounts to a kind of lulling spell, chanted tunefully and eternally by the TV, the billboard, the suburb. A spell that convinces us that the things we want most from the world are comfort, convenience, security. A spell that by now we sing to each other. A spell that, should it start to weaken, we try to strengthen with medication, with consumption, with noise. A slight frantic enchantment, one that has to get louder all the time to block out the troubling question constantly forming in the back of our minds: 'Is this all there is?"
Author: Bill McKibben

7. "I didn't have the time to literally write and draw the strip at the same time."
Author: Bob Kane

8. "In many places it is literally not safe physically for youngsters to go to school. And in many schools, and its becoming almost generally true, it is spiritually unsafe to attend public schools. Look back over the history of education to the turn of the century and the beginning of the educational philosophies, pragmatism and humanism were the early ones, and they branched out into a number of other philosophies which have led us now into a circumstance where our schools are producing the problems that we face."
Author: Boyd K. Packer

9. "This funny little film we did called 'Sharknado' has caused so much buzz, I would have never imagined. It's literally caused more buzz than anything else I've ever done. I had no idea that it was going to turn into this phenomenon."
Author: Cassie Scerbo

10. "My mother finally took me to a child psychologist, who knew exactly what I was, but she just couldn't accept it and kept trying to tell my folks I was reading their body language and was very observant, so I had good reason to imagine I heard people's thoughts. Of course, she couldn't admit I was literally hearing people's thoughts because that just didn't fit into her world."
Author: Charlaine Harris

11. "Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity' is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty' mean? Or ‘Motherland'? Or ‘progress'? Or ‘democracy'? Or ‘beauty'? But even in our self-deception, we become gods."
Author: Dan Simmons

12. "A robot-arm in a factory doesn't decide minute by minute whether to rivet or revolt - it just does the job is has literally been trained to do. It's if and when we build a conscious robot that we may have to worry."
Author: Daniel H. Wilson

13. "Though Beckett remained confined to the same claustrophobic hotel room that had housed him for weeks now, he'd attended the wedding in every sense but literally.He dressed for the occasion, and Eve helped him get his bow tie just right before she left, promising once again that her hummingbird pin would send him every detail it could.Riveted to the live feed from Eve's transmitter on his hotel room TV, Beckett stood when the congregation stood, and he sat when they sat. And when he noticed that the camera had bounced even lower, Beckett knelt.As Kyle came fluttering down the aisle in her simple blue dress, Beckett swore aloud in the empty room. "Shit, Fairy Princess, you're an angel."
Author: Debra Anastasia

14. "They pulled Resurrection out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed."
Author: Ellen Burstyn

15. "I was traumatized by the cartoon version of 'The Hobbit.' It's not supposed to be scary, I don't think, but literally I think that's the most scared I've ever been."
Author: Emily Meade

16. "In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well tended. "Only horses seem to be equally happy, never children or the youth," he wrote. ... He called it "horse happiness" and had noticed the same phenomenon in Nuremburg and Dresden. In part, he knew this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison. "At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting." He added, "One might easily wish he were a horse!"
Author: Erik Larson

17. "To be apathetic is literally to be without passion."
Author: Erwin Raphael McManus

18. "You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because -- now do please be honest with yourself for once -- you'd have left, too."
Author: Glen Duncan

19. "I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me."
Author: Henri Matisse

20. "(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion." Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying."
Author: Howard Kerr

21. "I can read in bed all night long. I can watch movies all night long. And I can have sex for literally minutes."
Author: Jarod Kintz

22. "During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began to understand that this happened because I was starving myself. In starvation mode, my body literally thought I was facing a famine. It didn't know that I was living near a grocery store and several fast-food restaurants. Thinking I was facing a real food shortage, its primal instinct was to binge on large amounts of food, conserving fat in preparation for the hard times ahead."
Author: Jenni Schaefer

23. "It was really a pleasure to play someone who's literally pushed past her breaking point repeatedly."
Author: Jeri Ryan

24. "Magazines were new. The Gentleman's Magazine—the first periodical called a "magazine"—appeared in London in 1731. It offered "a Monthly Collection, to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces."3 The metaphor is to weapons. A magazine is, literally, an arsenal; a piece is a firearm."
Author: Jill Lepore

25. "What I have lately said of painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art?"
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

26. "My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally."
Author: John Dominic Crossan

27. "Boys from my generation all love Jim Carrey! But you know, just being in his house with him and pitching jokes that he would act out, literally felt like the dreams that I had, so it was amazing."
Author: John Francis Daley

28. "Did Owen say your grandmother was a banshee?""He said she was 'wailing like a banshee,'" I explained.Dan got out the dictionary , then; he was clucking his tongue and shaking his head, and laughing at himself saying, "That boy! What a boy! Brilliant but preposterous!" And that was the first time I learned, literally, what a banshee was--a banshee, in Irish folklore, is a female spirit whose wailing is a sign that a loved one will soon die."
Author: John Irving

29. "No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy."
Author: John Ruskin

30. "We actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells... We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms."
Author: Jonathan Eisen

31. "Because videogames are so inherently influenced by movies, to take a movie and literally create a videogame out of it, you're immediately setting limitations and expectations on what that game can be."
Author: Josh Trank

32. "I mean hell,, I was literally knocking on death's door, and I still looked awesome."
Author: Jus Accardo

33. "He stands confidently in his hot pink mankini. When I told him it was the only suit left, he literally shrugged and put it on. Tan skin, ripped abs and stylish wayfarers- he instantly looked cool even wearing that damn thing. And the girls playing water volleyball even gawked at his ass"
Author: Krista Ritchie

34. "I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you'll go a week where you'll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time."
Author: Laura Bell Bundy

35. "I'm literally too hot to handle."
Author: Lisa Desrochers

36. "Far from being tortured, the prisoners [at Guantanamo] are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The U.S. military hands each jihadist his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship the Times of London. It's not just unbecoming to buy in to Muslim psychoses; in the end, it's self-defeating. And our self-defeat is their surest shot at victory...Even a loser can win when he's up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western Civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, the jihadists figure: hey, why not us?"
Author: Mark Steyn

37. "Stories are masks of God.That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them."
Author: Melanie Tem

38. "I'm kind of a clothes freak, so I'll switch my wardrobe every year or twice a year; I'll kind of move stuff in and out. Some t-shirts will stay, obviously, but some, I'll make a shift and give it to Goodwill. I'll leave clothes in my back alley, because I live by the beach, so literally you'll see a homeless guy with a three hundred dollar jacket."
Author: Nick Swardson

39. "If Jesus were to ask me, as He did that poor demoniac in the Gospel: "What is your name?" I too would have to reply: "My name is legion, for there are many of us" (Mk 5:9). There are as many of us as there are desires, plans and regrets which we harbor, each one different from and contrary to others which pull us in opposite directions. They literally dis-tract us, drag us apart."
Author: Raniero Cantalamessa

40. "For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom."
Author: Rebecca Solnit

41. "For, quite literally, the whole world today is looking for us to take the lead in carrying out those obligations imposed on the American people as a whole by the beautiful, compassionate and courageous principle of noblesse oblige."
Author: Robert W. Welch Jr.

42. "An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction."
Author: Rusty Schweickart

43. "I literally was saved by a role, from becoming a cab driver. I never did have to wait tables, though, so looking back I guess I had it pretty soft."
Author: Sam Waterston

44. "She didn't understand that. "How can anyone be afraid of love?""How can they not?" His face was completely aghast. "When you love someone... truly love them, friend or lover, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt—you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it's crippling—like having your heart carved out. It leaves you naked and exposed, wondering what you did to make them want to hurt you so badly when all you did was love them. What is so wrong with you that no one can keep faith with you? That no one can love you? To have it happen once is bad enough... but to have it repeated? Who in their right mind would not be terrified of that?"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

45. "This isn't just your mind paying more attention—suddenly your entire body is paying attention. When this happens, it's outside our conscious capabilities. There are no words. Our language becomes that of the river. All the features of the river speak to you and you to them through motion. There is tension, threat, there is joy and release, and overall, a deep, deep sense of flow. You are literally part of the flow of the world."
Author: Steven Kotler

46. "But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies."
Author: Thomas Howard

47. "In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is literally, the force of gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

48. "Are you aware of who you really are in relationship to the very God who created the Universe, who scattered the stars and aligned the planets? Only to those who remember and realize that they are literally spirit children of a God who knows and loves them, can the fire of refinement be welcome. Otherwise, pain and adversity are just that, pain and adversity. Fire doesn't purify; it only burns."
Author: Toni Sorenson

49. "You replace every molecule of every cell in your body within the course of only one year. I am not being flip when I refer to the "new you." It is quite literally possible, no matter how bad you are feeling or eating today, to be utterly transformed in just 365 days. But it won't take you that long. You can be feeling significantly better in just a couple of days and make lasting changes to your health within a month."
Author: Woodson Merrell

50. "For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can't sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed."
Author: Yōko Ogawa

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