Prose Quotes - Page 20

• Rachel Cusk's books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights.

  Julie Burchill

  Book, Eye, Pages

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• For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

  James Broughton

  Walks, Walking

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• Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.

  Erma Bombeck

  Mother, Hands, Years

  "Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession".

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• I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

  Ben Lerner

  Reading, White, Important

  Ben Lerner (2012). “Leaving the Atocha Station”, p.11, Granta Books

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• I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

  Paul Auster

  Reading, Writing, Detectives

  "Big Think Interview With Paul Auster". Interviewed with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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• Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.

  Sam Lipsyte

  Integrity, Moving, Book

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• A page of good prose remains invincible.

  John Cheever

  Pages, Invincible, Remains

  "The Stories of John Cheever". Book by John Cheever, www.theguardian.com. 1978.

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• I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Keys, Magic, Language

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.1251, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface.

  Susan Griffin

  Fall, Writing, Different

  Susan Griffin (1996). “The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society”, Anchor

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• Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable

  Per Brinch Hansen

  Art, Writing, Crystals

  Per Brinch Hansen (1996). “The search for simplicity: essays in parallel programming”, IEEE

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• All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Writing, Ambition

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• Here lies a plain and simple Jew who wrote in plain and simple prose.

  Sholom Aleichem

  Lying, Simple, Jew

  "A Reading to Recall the Father of Tevye" by Clyde Haberman, www.nytimes.com. May 17, 2010.

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• MORE CONSISTENTLY THAN EVER I WAS TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT CINEMA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ART HAS ITS OWN POSSIBILITIES WHICH ARE EQUAL TO THOSE OF PROSE. I WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW CINEMA IS ABLE TO OBSERVE LIFE, WITHOUT INTERFERING, CRUDELY OR OBVIOUSLY, WITH ITS CONTINUITY. FOR THAT IS WHERE I SEE THE POETIC ESSENCE OF CINEMA.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Art, Believe, Essence

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• An appreciation of prose is learned, not instinctive. It is an acquired taste, like Scotch whisky.

  Abigail Padgett

  Appreciation, Scotch, Taste

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• Clyde Phillip Wachsberger's delightful memoir about tending beds of flowers as compensation for a lonely middle age only to find unexpected romance along the way is a sweet reminder that, as he puts it, 'anything can happen in a garden.' In prose that balances candor with perfect courtesy, he charms us with the message that keeping a garden with a beloved companion, this most ephemeral of all the arts, can bring us the most enduring joys and pleasures.

  Philip Gambone

  Lonely, Sweet, Art

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• A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.

  Eyvind Johnson

  Years, Achievement, Looks

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• My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law.

  Robert Schumann

  Struggle, Law, Whole Life

  "Early Letters of Robert Schumann".

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• I should like, if I could, to leave a humble gift -- a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods.

  Max Ehrmann

  Humble, Noble, Mood

  Max Ehrmann (2003). “Desiderata: Words for Life”, p.45, Scholastic Inc.

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• Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements.

  Amit Ray

  Yoga, Exercise, Movement

  "Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style". Book by Amit Ray, 2012.

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• With "Taipei" Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation...

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Interesting, Generations, Stylist

  Bret Easton Ellis‏ @BretEastonEllis, twitter.com. March 4, 2013.

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• To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

  John Ciardi

  Simple, Mind, Destruction

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• The advent of the internet has made so many things possible. Self- published recreational journalism has always been around; but back when you had to at least learn to run a mimeograph, and you had to pay postage to distribute your deathless prose, people who didn't actually have much to say for themselves found other hobbies

  Teresa Nielsen Hayden

  Running, Self, People

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• And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

  James Payn

  Verses

  James Payn (1882). “Sammlung”

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• Edwidge Danticat's prose has a Chekhovian simplicity--an ability to state the most urgent truths in a measured and patiently plain style that gathers a luminous energy as it moves inexorably forward. In this book she makes a strong case that art, for immigrants from countries where human rights and even survival are often in jeopardy, must be a vocation to witness if it is not to be an idle luxury.

  Madison Smartt Bell

  Country, Art, Strong

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• If geography is prose, maps are iconography.

  Lennart Meri

  Iconography, Maps, Geography

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