Prose Quotes - Page 14

• A book that bores me to tears is a book that neglects character building and quality of prose.

  Kristin Cashore

  Book, Character, Tears

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• When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose

  Anne Fadiman

  Writing, Dark, Purple

  Anne Fadiman (2008). “At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays”, p.64, Macmillan

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• Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses

  J. Patrick Lewis

  Long, Library, Dozen

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• And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Want, Relish

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4321, Delphi Classics

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• I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

  Richard Rorty

  Wish, Able, Heidegger

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• In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

  William H. Gass

  Ambition, Thinking, Together

  "William Gass, The Art of Fiction No. 65". Interview with Thomas LeClair, www.theparisreview.org. Summer 1977.

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• Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Memorable, Men, Poetry

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.99

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• I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Hurt, Writing, Patriotic

  Ernest Hemingway, Carlos Baker (2003). “Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961”, p.432, Simon and Schuster

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• Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Father, War, Good Things

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2015). “The Joyful Wisdom”, p.91, Friedrich Nietzsche

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• There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement.

  Robert Creeley

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Intimate

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• Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

  Raymond Chandler

  Love, Appreciation, Art

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.95, Univ of California Press

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• The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Mean, Literature

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• He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Writing, Poetry, Temples

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• Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Communication, Science, Prose And Poetry

  "Definitions of Poetry" (1811)

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• I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

  Robert Frost

  Poetry, Way, Lost

  Robert Frost (1961). “Conversations on the Craft of Poetry”

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• I'm a poetry-skipper myself. I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country - make it any other two persons. This doesn't mean that I hate poetry. I don't feel that strongly about it. It only means that those who wish to communicate with me by means of the written word must do so in prose.

  Will Cuppy

  Country, Hate, Mean

  "How to Get From January to December". Book by Will Cuppy, 1951.

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• Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Communication, Writing, Voice

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

  Rose Tremain

  Moving, Writing, Journey

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• He turns and walks away, moving so quickly that the candle flames shiver with the motion of the air. “I miss you,” Isobel says as he leaves, but the sentiment is crushed by the clatter of the beaded curtain falling closed behind him.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Moving, Fall, Air

  Erin Morgenstern (2016). “The Night Circus”, p.134, Random House

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• Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning

  Michael Swanwick

  Character, Mean, Hands

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• There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

  Sam Lipsyte

  Fiction, Pieces, Waste

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• Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Love, Beautiful, Gay

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2016). “CHRISTMAS & NEW YEAR™S TALES (Holiday Classics Series): Including Anne Shirley Series”, p.512, e-artnow

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• Futurists are already predicting the day mankind builds its replacement, Artificial Intelligence. Daniel Wilson shows what might happen when that computer realizes its creators are no longer needed. Lean prose, great characters, and almost unbearable tension ensure that Robopocalypse is going to be a blockbuster. Once started I defy anyone to put it down.

  Jack Du Brul

  Character, Might, Unbearable

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• ONE BLOOD is a richly detailed, intricately woven tale rendered in lush, evocative prose. This memorable debut heralds Qwantu Amaru as a talent well worth watching.

  Brandon Massey

  Memorable, Blood, Woven

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• But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Cells, Elephants, Body

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2003). “Middlesex”, p.99, A&C Black

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