Prose Quotes - Page 6

• 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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• However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

  James Schuyler

  Poetry, Poetic, Sentences

  James Schuyler (2004). “Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991”

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• The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day.

  Shannon Hale

  Spring, Night, Light

  Shannon Hale (2013). “Princess Academy: Palace of Stone”, p.202, A&C Black

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• I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.

  Gerald Durrell

  Atmosphere, Produce, Expected

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• What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

  Chinua Achebe

  Children, Book, Prose Poetry

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.44, Penguin

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• Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.

  Mina Loy

  Ideas, Sound, Made

  Mina Loy (2015). “The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy”, p.157, Macmillan

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• Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Dream, Ambition, Miracle

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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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• The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

  Randall Jarrell

  Crafts, Narrative, Length

  "The Rumpus mini-interview project #102: Max Winter". Interview with Maria Anderson, therumpus.net. September 21, 2017.

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• I often encountered books by academics and others who had not actually done what they had written about. They tend to create artificial simplicity; their prose doesn't have the vigor of "lived words." On the other hand, many practitioners lack the context or introspection to make their experiences and understandings transferable - and, in our time, many don't actually write the books they "author." My ideal is to unify theory and practice.

  James M Strock

  Book, Writing, Simplicity

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ...We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it's just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be.

  Maya Angelou

  Motivational, Determination, Believe

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• In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

  Lionel Shriver

  Writing, People, Finals

  "So Much For That". Interview with Bret Anthony Johnston, www.nationalbook.org. 2010.

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• I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.

  William Hazlitt

  Ambition, Player, Being The Best

  William Hazlitt, Duncan Wu (1998). “The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt”, Pickering & Chatto Ltd

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• Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Life, Beautiful, Money

  Essays, Second Series "Nominalist and Realist" (1844)

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• And of all glad words of prose or rhyme, The gladdest are Act while there yet is time

  Franklin P. Adams

  Volunteer, Rhyme, Glad

  Franklin Pierce Adams, “Maud Muller Mutatur”

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• Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.

  T. S. Eliot

  Christianity, Graves, Admiring

  1935 Religion and Literature.

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• The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Funny, Life, America

  "Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life". Book by Louis Kronenberger. Chapter: "The Spirit of the Age", p. 18, 1954.

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• Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

  William C. Bryant

  Eloquence

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• Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Art, Science, Journey

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