Prose Quotes

Closer, it’s all right. Touch the man of grief.Do. Don’t be afraid. My troubles are mine and I am the only man alive who can sustain them.

~ Sophocles

As she gobbled up the miles, big ravines appeared before her, their starving mouths open for the swallow.

~ R.j. Lawrence

Oyin Da’s mind is as elegant as a French horn, thoughts moving in whorls and evoking fresh mint leaves.

~ Tade Thompson

Coyote Mountain too much for her, alone with pine trees up to your neck, wooden bench by the Pecos River which runssilver in the winter untold. Dust-bit dirt lonely Indians with wet brown bellies which the moon shines upon like a frosty lake, the silver show of market stalls and paintings of four pitiful horses likes of which the Spanish brought under the Mexican memory of nightfall but the oldMing china-woman on her rickety bicycle with broken straw hat with bow-legged strength,simply; the perfect depiction of the fellaheen world riddled with ancient endeavour, the old china women of the world you’ll find them so perfect in all your cities under the twinkle of stars. Thewould be fishermen of dawn, collected wintery downpours and sunlight situations which never beckon further than his share, meant on this earth , match stick motels which warp your loving tales of good mornings or whichever is left.

~ Samuel J Dixey

And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider’s web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving—to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing—light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

How might you measure men beneath our skies? The shear depth of the human heart and her capacity for humbleness?Like a scientific fraction huh, but I am born of these times so forgive me that. Under this grey skied dream which has already been, already dreamt. Already past? Might everything be just hindsight? Already known gone faded the sun too, so nothing like that to be worried about? AndEngland when did she fall or might she never have begun? Withered earth before the withered Sun? Your forever field will forever be in my heart; alas here I am bold content and never knowing.

~ Samuel J Dixey

There will come a time in life, when you have to take decisions from your own. Choose wisely.As whatever you choose, will require your “complete time” & “attention”.So you must need to trust yourself,whenever you have to make a life’s decision.

~ Ayushi Jain

The itchy reality of these places is that they are no place at all, they are nowhere. There’s a sleeping monster in nowhere, and it is older and bigger than you, it is island-sized, and it has never known happiness. If you’re ever nowhere at all, and you do think about it, and you can hardly think about anything else, and you can hardly breathe, and oh, God, it is awake, it is that grand realisation which nobody can speak. Don’t speak it! What would you say?But all is not lost, because in our language we have this phrase. We never have to be nowhere at all, we only ever have to be in the middle of nowhere, which is a softer, funnier place to be. Do you see? The phrase makes nowhere a place, with boundaries and a centre, and if there are boundaries then you can leave this place, you can travel in any direction and “nowhere” will cease to be, and this whole experience will be something you can laugh about.

~ Quintin Smith

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same

~ Deborah Levy

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

~ China Miéville

Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.

~ Peter Heller

There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.

~ China Miéville

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.

~ Joseph Brodsky

Bottom line, when someone defensively says their way of writing is their style, then that usually means they're making an excuse for poor prose.

~ A.j. Flowers

Gennia is eating and talking to Ruiz on the phone. Each time he takes a mouthful, he catches a whiff of his shirt, which stinks of failure and yesterday.

~ Michael Robotham

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

~ Patti Smith

Flora took pleasure in the delicacy of her approach and studied the ways of the smallest, sweetest blooms she could find, tiny pimpernels and forget-me-nots hiding in the pockets of the fields. The energy of the sun on her body and the joy of foraging filled her soul. She flew the fields and gathered until the light began to fade and she heard the sound of her forager sisters' wings turning for home. Then she joined them.

~ Laline Paull

Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.


~ Sara Sheridan

As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by theheels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania forbattle and for love, when seen from the place where your staringeyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s thatI think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anythingchange? Nothing. No other days exist but these of oursbefore the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. Mayit be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of whatI am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope youspent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in thebox. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.

~ Italo Calvino

The joyous clamor in my mind drowned out the strange sound outside the car: a humming noise that was gathering speed and growing louder, a roar that was not the waves curling up the beach.

~ Padma Venkatraman

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old.Not young.But a viable die-able age.

~ Arundhati Roy

There were these things and the flames ate these things, and since fire doesn't distinguish between the word of God and the word of the Soviet Communications Registry Bureau, both Qur'an and telephone directory returned to His mouth in the same inhalation of smoke.

~ Anthony Marra

You never turn away family, no matter how f***ed up they are.

~ Ronald Velesovsky

Despite my affection for subtext and plot and prose at its best... life, it turns out, is nothing more than the finer details.

~ Bailey Vincent

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.

~ Rachel Kushner

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.

~ Sesshu Foster

Because even when there is no hope, somehow you can still find a place to pin inside the things that you need.

~ Chris Howard

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

And I howled at that swarm and the crops and the sky, and the stars should have quit because there weren't no reason to be shining.

~ Chris Howard

why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.

~ Bob Dylan

I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.

~ Chris Howard

I wouldn't give ten gallons of my own piss for clear sentence that gives the sense of a tree as a tree, when I revel in the nonsense of its being my own Grandfather, a letter from yesterday, or a masturbating fist.

~ David Joseph Cribbin

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

~ Oscar Wilde

You couldn't make up something that looked so right.

~ Chris Howard

You take what you can get, I reckon. You take what you can get.

~ Chris Howard

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

~ Constance Hale

I’m a man of music as much as I am a man of words and prose. One could even possibly say that they, music and prose, are connected to a lengthy and mutually beneficial extent and that they have been of centuries or millenniums.

~ Nicholas Trandahl

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

~ Emily Dickinson

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

~ Gerald Durrell