Derivations From Literary or Mythical Places
- Cloud cuckoo land, an unrealistically idealistic state where everything is perfect, from The Birds by Aristophanes
- Eden, any paradisaical area, named after the religious Garden of Eden
- El Dorado, any area of great wealth, after the mythical city of gold
- hell, any horrible place, after the religious Hell
- Lilliputian, meaning very small in size — Lilliput, fictional island in the book Gulliver's Travels
- Munchkin, small children, dwarfs, or anything of diminutive stature — from the Munchkin country in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Never Never Land, a metaphor for eternal childhood, immortality, and escapism, from J.M.Barries's Peter Pan
- Shangri-La, a mythical utopia, a language usage — Shangri-La, fictional place in the novel Lost Horizon
- utopia, term for organized society — Utopia, fictional republic from the book of the same name
Read more about this topic: List Of Words Derived From Toponyms
Famous quotes containing the words literary, mythical and/or places:
“Dining-out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The places we have known do not only belong to the world of space in which we situate them for the sake of simplicity. They were but a thin slice between contiguous impression which formed our lives back then; the memory of a certain image is but the regret of a certain instant; and the houses, the roads, the avenues are fleeting, alas! as the years.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)