Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane. — George Orwell
Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance. — Amy Lowell
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. — H. L. Mencken
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. — Walter Benjamin
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton — Bill Vaughan
Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath. — Robert Pinsky
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes. — Cole Porter
Poesy and oratory omit things not essential, and insert little beautiful digressions, in order to place everything in the most effective light. — Isaac Watts
Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices. — Amos Oz
Short Prose Quotes
If geography is prose, maps are iconography. — Lennart Meri
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor. — Derek Walcott
it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. — Ernest Hemingway
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. — Christopher Fry
The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose. — Paul Laurence Dunbar
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. — Virginia Woolf
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. — Voltaire
An appreciation of prose is learned, not instinctive. It is an acquired taste, like Scotch whisky. — Abigail Padgett
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. — Vladimir Nabokov
Prose Image Quotes
Love Propose Quotes
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy — Jane Austen
A Christian community should do as Jesus did: propose and not impose. Its attraction must lie in the radiance cast by the love of brothers. — Jean Vanier
Courtroom for Ted Bundy's trial is packed with women, trying to meet him and give him love letters and wedding-fucking-proposals...and the first thought that enters my mind is, "And I'm not getting laid." What am I doing wrong? — Bill Hicks
The most important things are the hardest to say — Stephen King
I never saw so sweet a face. As that I stood before. My heart has left it dwelling place ... and can return no more. — John Clare
I'm afraid I was very much the traditionalist. I went down on one knee and dictated a proposal which my secretary faxed over straight away. — Stephen Fry
What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love. — Francois de la Rochefoucauld
I propose that the phenomenon of love is the psychological pivot in the persecution of women. — Ti-Grace Atkinson
I come to the point of using steel, and simply cannot. It's like the marriage proposal of a perfectly eligible man who just isn't loveable. It is wood I love. — Anne Truitt
Amending the U.S. Constitution, the document most sacred to those who love freedom and liberty, is a delicate endeavor and should be done only on the basis of the most clear and convincing evidence that a proposed amendment is necessary. — Ben Nelson
Prose Writing Quotes
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. — Ernest Hemingway
Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose. — Barbara Tuchman
In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story. — Ben Bova
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
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
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. — Samuel McChord Crothers
Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction. — Robert Frost
A pop song is a condensed version of a life in three minutes, whereas, when you go to write your prose, you have to find the rhythm in your words, and you have to find the rhythm in the voice that you have found and the way you're speaking. — Bruce Springsteen
Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. — Elmore Leonard
Poetry And Prose Quotes
As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry. — Henry Purcell
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart. — Ryszard Kapuscinski
You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry. — Satya Nadella
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose. — Lafcadio Hearn
The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema. — Derek Jarman
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
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. — W. Somerset Maugham
The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart. — Rabindranath Tagore
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose. — Walter Savage Landor
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation. — Clive James
Beautiful Prose Quotes
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days). — Ian McEwan
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty. — John Cheever
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony. — Horace Walpole
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
The very term "turning pages" suggests nonstop action. But I am all about character and beautiful writing. I eat that up like popcorn. Whether a book is action-packed or not, all I need are well-written prose and quirky, fabulous characters to keep me going. — Elizabeth Wein
Mother Dolores Hart's prose is a reflection of the inner beauty she has always possessed. A fascinating read... and read again! — Robert Evans
The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency. — James Kelman
The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work. — Julianna Baggott
The raw beauty of Natalia Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity. — Hilma Wolitzer
The beauty of word processing, God bless my word processor, is that it keeps the plotting very fluid. The prose becomes like a liquid that you can manipulate at will. In the old days, when I typed, every piece of typing paper was like cast in concrete. — Sue Grafton
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. — Virginia Woolf
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries. — Eugenio Montale
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble. — John C. Ransom
Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised. — Michael Morpurgo
The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth. — George Saintsbury
Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future. — Simon Schama
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
I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers. — Matthew Healy
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
My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. ... (when asked who wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening') Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you can imagine it taking two men to write one song. ... Good authors, too, who once knew better words now use only four-letter words writing prose. ... Brush up your Shakespeare and they'll all kowtow. — Cole Porter
The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital. — George Steiner
All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind. — Robert Kennedy
No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure. — Ernest Hemingway
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably. — John Cheever
Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress. — Anton Chekhov
What is wonderful about a university like LSE is that you not only receive teaching of very high quality, you also learn where to find the knowledge you are seeking. And you make unexpected discoveries; it was a Marxist professor who introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman, a great master of English prose as well as theology. — Pierre Trudeau
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper. — Francis Crick
We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of. — Anton Chekhov
Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. — Victor Hugo
My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness. — Anthony Doerr
In Conclusion
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