Prose Quotes - Page 6

• Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.

  William Zinsser

  Confused, Writing, Tired

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• It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

  Eugenio Montale

  Cutting, Language, Poetic

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• When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

  John Crowe Ransom

  Waiting, Style, Ransom

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• I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

  Marguerite Young

  Real, Book, Writing

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• "I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else"

  Joanne Greenberg

  Sorry, Crazy, Half

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• Poetry must be as well written as prose.

  Ezra Pound

  Poetry, Wells, Written

  Letter to Harriet Monroe, Jan. 1915

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• The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

  William Shenstone

  Musical, Lines, Scripture

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• All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

  Norman MacCaig

  Book, Fishing, Sides

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• I can see that "reap" and "deep," "prayers" and "bears," . . . do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Prayer, Effort, Understanding

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• Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory.

  Chris Ware

  Love, Writing, Eye

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• Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,-imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,-"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of-the air!" Richter: German humorist & prose writer.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Country, Thinking, Air

  Thomas Carlyle (1872). “Works”, p.5

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• The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

  Constance Hale

  Shapes, Flesh, Bones

  Constance Hale (2013). “Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose”, p.11, Three Rivers Press

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• Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

  Eugenio Montale

  Today, Verses

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• There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

  Eugenio Montale

  Writing, Connections, Poet

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• The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Heart, Literature, Tradition

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• Prose talks and poetry sings.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Poetry

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• It's funny, because in deference to conventional wisdom, I spent my struggling writer years trying to suppress my naturally baroque literary voice and write clean, spare prose. I finally gave up and embraced my baroque tendencies when I wrote the Kushiel series.

  Jacqueline Carey

  Wisdom, Struggle, Writing

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• What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or reject; to run them into verse or to give them the other harmony of prose.

  John Dryden

  Running, Giving, Judgment

  'Fables Ancient and Modern' (1700) preface

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• Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

  Jerry B. Jenkins

  Book, Writing, Poetry Is

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• There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Average, Paper

  Francis Crick (1995). “Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.

  John M. Ford

  Believe, Expression, People

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• I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.

  Garrett Hedlund

  Writing, Scott Fitzgerald, Way

  "Garrett Hedlund: 'Life is fun when you're in motion'". Interview With Damon Wise, www.theguardian.com. October 6, 2012.

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• They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Rocks, Age, Shells

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• I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.

  Ben Brantley

  Moving, Play, Challenges

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• History meets romance meets suspense! Compelling, original and wildly romantic, Beatriz Williams’ prose is stunning and the plot edge-of-your-seat gripping. OVERSEAS is an absolute triumph—I loved every page.

  Tilly Bagshawe

  Romance, Triumph, Plot

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