Prose Quotes - Page 7

• 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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• Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

  Rajneesh

  Fall, Heart, Cutting

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• The only valid reason to use clichés is in the speech of a character. Cliches are indications of sloppy writing. The writer does not respect the scene he is trying to dramatize enough to fashion it through precise prose and imaginative imagery. From the book Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction by

  Leonard Bishop

  Fashion, Powerful, Book

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• A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem.

  Jean Burden

  Dog, Cat, Animal

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• On May 15, 1957 Linus Pauling made an extraordinary speech to the students of Washington University. ... It was at this time that the idea of the scientists' petition against nuclear weapons tests was born. That evening we discussed it at length after dinner at my house and various ones of those present were scribbling and suggesting paragraphs. But it was Linus Pauling himself who contributed the simple prose of the petition that was much superior to any of the suggestions we were making.

  Edward Condon

  Science, Simple, Ideas

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• Like Molière's M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic.

  Ernest Nagel

  Nature, Real, Science

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• Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

  T. S. Eliot

  Typewriters, Long, Crafts

  T. S. Eliot (2011). “The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 1: 1898-1922”, p.240, Faber & Faber

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• What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

  Mark Twain

  Schedules, Crafts, Landscape

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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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• The prose as such has to be singing the song the story is telling.

  Leonard Michaels

  Song, Singing, Stories

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• There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

  Ernest Hemingway

  War, Book, Writing

  Ernest Hemingway, William Kozlenko (1942). “Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time”, New York : Crown Publishers

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• If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Water, Feelings

  Death in the Afternoon ch. 16 (1932)

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• An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Writing, Sound, Essentials

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• Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Plain Language, Imagination

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• I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

  Lynn Abbey

  Writing, Thinking, Literature

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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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• Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

  William Zinsser

  Believe, Writing, Want

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• In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Writing, Lines

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• There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it.

  Richard Livingstone

  Memories, Sleep, Years

  Richard Livingstone (2013). “On Education”, p.101, Cambridge University Press

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• I assure you, my children, that when a Christian carries out with love the most insignificant everyday action, that action overflows with the transcendence of God. That is why I have told you so often, and hammered away at it, that the Christian vocation consists in making heroic verse out of the prose of each day. Heaven and earth seem to merge, my children, on the horizon. But where they really meet is in your hearts, when you sanctify your everyday lives.

  Josemaria Escriva

  Faith, Christian, Children

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• I fear I have not one good word to say this fair morning, though the sun shines so encouragingly on the distant hills and gentle river and the trees are in their festive hues. I am not festive, though contented. When obliged to give myself to the prose of life, as I am on this occasion of being established in a new home I like to do the thing, wholly and quite, - to weave my web for the day solely from the grey yarn.

  Margaret Fuller

  Life, Nature, Morning

  Margaret Fuller, Robert N. Hudspeth (1984). “The letters of Margaret Fuller”, Cornell Univ Pr

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• If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

  Salman Rushdie

  Voice, Giving, Dumb

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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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• Ah! What avails the classic bent
  And what the cultured word,
  Against the undoctored incident
  That actually occurred?
  And what is Art whereto we press
  Through paint and prose and rhyme-
  When Nature in her nakedness
  Defeats us every time?

  Rudyard Kipling

  Art, Real, Classic

  Rudyard Kipling (1994). “The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling”, p.352, Wordsworth Editions

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