Literalism Quotes

“Of course, when you shut off your brain from rational analysis, any book is dangerous. Taking literally ancient parables from thousands of years ago is much more dangerous than playing with a loaded gun. Ancient scrawls, written by different authors in different centuries with different agendas--yeah, let's get mad literal about that.

The literalness problem is compounded in religion by the circular logic of not being allowed to question anything, or else you're lacking faith.”
― Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism

“. Nature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stanhope?"
Stanhope was standing by, silent, while Mrs. Parry communed with her soul and with one or two of her neighbours on the possibilities of dressing the Chorus. He turned his head and answered, "That Nature is terribly good? Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?"
"Why, certainly," Miss Fox said. "Terribly--dreadfully--very."
"Yes," Stanhope said again. "Very. Only--you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I mean 'full of terror'. A dreadful goodness."
"I don't see how goodness can be dreadful," Miss Fox said, with a shade of resentment in her voice. "If things are good they're not terrifying, are they?"
"It was you who said 'terribly'," Stanhope reminded her with a smile, "I only agreed."
"And if things are terrifying," Pauline put in, her eyes half closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, "can they be good?"
He looked down on her. "Yes, surely," he said, with more energy. "Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?”
― Charles Williams, Descent into Hell

“That tongue of yours. Lots of people commented on Devon’s tongue. She stuck it out, sometimes, inspecting it in the mirror. There was nothing special about her tongue that she could ever see.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”

“Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!”

“You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

“Selective literalism' is another attempt in a very long line of techniques designed and intended to shape God into our own image".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]”
― R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is the Destination: A Book of Quotes With Commentaries

“Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Imagine that a literalist and a moderate have gone to a restaurant for lunch, and the menu promises "fresh lobster" as the speciality of the house. Loving lobster, the literalist simply places his order and waits. The moderate does likewise, but claims to be entirely comfortable with the idea that the lobster might not really be a lobster after all—perhaps it's a goose! And, whatever it is, it need not be "fresh" in any conventional sense—for the moderate understands that the meaning of this term shifts according to context. This would be a very strange attitude to adopt toward lunch, but it is even stranger when considering the most important questions of existence—what to live for, what to die for, and what to kill for. Consequently, the appeal of literalism isn't difficult to see. Human beings reflexively demand it in almost every area of their lives. It seems to me that religious people, to the extent that they're 'certain' that their scripture was written or inspired by the Creator of the universe, demand it too. - pg. 67-68”
― Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

“In this world, to be overly literal is a profound weakness.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Young Jane Young

“And it is, indeed, to the more general problem of fetishism that this new twist brings us: after the becoming-sign of the object, the becoming-object of the sign.
In the sexual register, the fetish is no longer a sign but a pure object, meaningless in itself - a banal accessory, but one of absolute value, for which there can be no possible exchange. It is that object and no other.
But this banal singularity means that any object whatever can become a fetish. Its potentiality is total, precisely because it lies beyond any sexual reference or metaphor. It is the perfect object of sex, its perfect realization, insofar as it substitutes for any real sex - just as Virtual Reality substitutes itself for the real world and in that way becomes the universal form of our modern fetishism.
Modern man's immense panoply of information technology has become his true object of (perverse?) desire.
Fetishism being, as the name indicates (Feiticho), linked to abstraction and artifice, it is all the more radical for the abstraction being total.
If it was possible, in the past, to speak of the fetishism of the commodity, of money, of the simulacrum and the spectacle, that was still a limited fetishism (related to sign-value).
There stretches beyond this for us today the world of radical fetishism, linked to the de-signification and limitless operation of the real - to the sign's becoming pure object once again, before or beyond any metaphor.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“The virtuality of war is not, then, a metaphor. It is the literal passage from reality into fiction, or rather the immediate metamorphosis of the real into fiction. The real is now merely the asymptotic horizon of the Virtual.
And it isn't just the reality of the real that's at issue in all this, but the reality of cinema. It's a little like Disneyland: the theme parks are now merely an alibi - masking the fact that the whole context of life has been disneyfied.
It's the same with the cinema: the films produced today are merely the visible allegory of the cinematic form that has taken over everything - social and political life, the landscape, war, etc. - the form of life totally scripted for the screen. This is no doubt why cinema is disappearing: because it has passed into reality. Reality is disappearing at the hands of the cinema and cinema is disappearing at the hands of reality. A lethal transfusion in which each loses its specificity.
If we view history as a film - which it has become in spite of us - then the truth of information consists in the postsynchronization, dubbing and sub-titling of the film of history.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“One of the variants of this lethal accomplishment, of this acting-out, is the realization of all metaphors - the collapse of the metaphor into the real.
Here, again, we have the phantasm of materializing all that is parable, myth, fable and metaphor.
Romain Gary: 'All humanity's metaphors end up becoming realities. I am coming to wonder whether the real aim of science is not a validation of metaphors.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“You mustn't take anybody's words too literally,
not even mine. Look at what literalism has done
to the fundamentalists. I don’t want you to make
the same mistake as them. And more
importantly, I don’t want to be the cause of the
horrors brought along by such mistake.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament