Quotes about prose

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

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

Prose: words in their best order poetry: the best words in the best order.

Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair— He took her bag.

I am running and singing and when it’s raining I’m the only one left on the open street, smiling with my eyes fixed on the sky because it’s cleaning me. I’m the one on the other side of the party, hearing laughter and the emptying of bottles while I peacefully make my way to the river, a lonely road, following the smell of the ocean. I’m the one waking up at 4am to witness the sunrise, where the sky touches the sea, and I hold my elbows, grasping tight to whatever I’ve made of myself.

Niko? I have decided to christen this little pool Le Cagot's Soul.""Oh?""Yes. Because it is clear and pure and lucid.""And treacherous and dangerous?""You know, Niko, I begin to suspect that you are a man of prose. It is a blemish on you.""No one's perfect.""Speak for yourself.

I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?

An author never lies. We do, however tend to speak in a fictional prose.

We are all running towards a destination which doesn't exist. On our way, dogs of life keep barking at us where we respond to some and some we throw stones at. Every dog teaches a lesson we are better off without. Every knife stabs a little deeper than we deserve. Every bruise stays a lot longer than it is meant to. Encumbered by forceful lessons of life we fight for the air of elation from the breaths we take to covert them into the moments of our real existence. Everything starts with life's t

Some can't handle the fiery poet, how she rips into souls burning words into prose.

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water.


If I stay close to the sea, I will go on well.

Prose divides shame into stations.

I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.

The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it below, somewhere on the ground floor. I left the house far behind as I walked on the path paved by the books, and every evening, baby Mangalam slept soundly on the bed I made for her on the window seat.

They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Æolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule.

Nowhere hidden has ever turned away a goodheart guest.

It's been the longest timeSince I've been in this place,Where I spend my whole dayHoping I'll see your face.Then I script things to say,And maybe what you'd say back.You don't know it yet,But, girl, it's a factThat I can see us Staying up late,Talking all night,But I guess I'll have to wait.'Cause it's brand-new,Yeah, I know we just met. I want to be there with you, But not just yet.Girl, you've got that look,Like you're hard to impress.So I'm bumbling with words,'Cause my mind is a mess.You wer

The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our la

I just wish you could see my demons for what they are, and lay here beside me on the floor. No words. Just your presence.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art

Cradle of SolitudeFor we know not why our tribulationsare given as suchour fragile formscreated from the dust...

Parched by the deprivation of your love for so long made me forget what a cup brimming with love, on my lips, felt like. Everything that now wets it, only wrinkles it with a bland taste.

The Waterfall and the Sea""Her love and passion are a waterfall, fed from the wellspring of her heart,gently tumbling into a pool, preparing herself to share her gifts.His passion and love are like the sea, deep and wide, waiting mysteriously,Patiently he awaits her, calling out through time and spaceShe hears his call, her pool overflowing.Her love and passion gushing over her banks she rushes toward himWinding and twisting she finds her way, destined to reach his shoresHe awaits her arrival as

Closed eyescan't sacrifice a third timei may never knowA dreamer's dreammy stars are onlymade of goldCame into this life holding onWas it a dream Or life lived beforeAlien genetics Formed on the 7thToo late So i was turned awayToo lateBut i seen those gatesIt’s just latelyi’ve forgot the wayWhat am i saying?somewhere out there is a starCovered in goldlaugh, its okayit's just best i wait this time can't sacrifice a third timehow will i knowfeverish devils place their bets the abyss or the flameBu

...flames moved towards himand dropped within-singed and marred his tender skin ...(the frightful plight tale)

Do You BelieveDo you believethat I have loved yousince the dawn of time?Do you believethat we were destinedto be intertwined?...

Do You Believe...on this road of lifeon this dayI take younow husband and wife...

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of.

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he wou

Sometimes the universe works in a really weird way. You hate the people who love you, and you love the people who just aren't really that into you. And then there are those who love you as you love them, but fate just decides that you're not meant to be.

You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel.

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend’s sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz

She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.

He didn’t like the way things were going.There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn.

Today may be your last chance to be you, someone you forgot to completely immerse yourself in because you were too worried about the details. The details that, no matter how many times you thought them through, brought you no closer to understanding. They just tied up your mind and prevented you from really letting in the things you love. Your demon that is standing before the beautiful floodgate and is keeping you in a dehydrated nothingness.Give him permission to walk away. He is not your keep

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.

I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone.

It was quite a beautiful thing, the way we simply just came to be, with no effort or trying and slowly we found each other’s hands in the dark. No chains or promises, just a simple sign of hopethat things will go on and get betterand that things and people and views are still out there, yet to be found.

Scott could feel the contents of his stomach flip over and over on themselves. He turned to the side and retched, frothy yellow bile spilled out onto the newspaper covered floor, filling the room with the putrid stench of previously ingested alcohol.'Look's like someone can't hold their drink,' McBlane said, and Dominic and Shugg laughed.Scott was still staring at the steam rising from his evacuated stomach contents as he heard the hammer fall. The dull crack of bone splintering under its weight

you remind me of someone i knew. looked just like you but kind.

He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head, and though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one for I have used them myself and there is no coming back. Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.

Yet you stand, too ashamed to run, too fearful to embrace. God I see so much ofwhat I love in that face.

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.

In the darkness with no ember, cold coals bear no flaming tinder. All the shadows, man resemble. In the darkness, wise men tremble. Prodigious foes made thee for pointless sake of prosaic power. Visited upon thyself no vestige of vision by late nights hour. In the stillness of normal eve, in longing for the night's reprieve. In air and earth arise a faint and subtle shift, tis follies gift. With tremulous breath, whisper faintly from thy spirits tower. 'Woe to me!', thy soul says. Cometh nigh, T

It has been a Prosy day for us, but for some people it has been a wonderful day. Someone was rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today- a great poem written- or a great man born. And some heart has been broken, Phil.

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappea

Maybe I live in the gates that lead to outbound international flights. Maybe that is home.And do I feel more comfortable at the departures or at the arrivals?

I like pros, especially when it comes to tennis and rent boys” — and here I’m really wondering if the pun on prose consolidates Bruce’s feeling toward it versus poetry under the sign of sex, which Bruce sometimes pays for, in order to direct us toward the pleasure of its use-function when monetised, a pleasure seldom associated with poetry, and one that might lead to the company of more pros. He continues: “If I can get a twofer, and the trick looks like Rafael Nadal, I’m in heaven.

I don’t need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore, like I always thought I would.

And perhaps, I'm a Tuesday night and you're a Wednesday morning the way we'll never even notice how we blend into each other.

When he asks you whyyou chose alone all these years.Tell him that it’s becauseyou love with all claws and bared teeth.Apologize for the scratchesthat you will leave on his skin;ask forgiveness for the bite marks.Tell him you never ever mean to love so hard, but you do.

Decades from now, my grandchild is going to be a poet... And she's going to write about how she's a living testament to how her grandmother made love to hurricane and calmed the storm.

The city they are building asks you to stay; remind yourself what is worth keeping, while the lighthouse of your moan warns the ship of your heart that he is a stone.

It doesn’t matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you’ve started to leave, you will run your whole life.

I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.

What is this thing? trading passions for a tiny bit of acceptance.

She told me there was a place on my face she wanted to inhale.

He said that he felt that there was a book hidden between us. Some small thing lodged between a rib or a summer. and He wanted to find it.

He left the next morning, searching for a city with light that reminded him of me. He would mail me empty envelopes and boxes, I would take them into my closet, shut the door, and quickly open them. A flash of foreign light would fill the room, but only for a moment. I would whisper ‘this is what we’re like, this is what we’re like.’…

Watch me go. Watch me. Because you said i couldn't. Because you thought I wouldn't. Go on, cry now. Cry.

...and I laugh and I spin and dance and frolic in ecstasy and I... I hurt no more, while you...you petrified little man, are left to wonder if it's you I speak of.

I’m fighting my way into existence, and I will keep doing so until the end of time.

So you will meet many ’someones’ who will give a new definition to your name. And you can not build walls, must not close the door and please don’t hide,because if you ask me about hurt and loveI will say love. Love because the hurt will come and go no matter what, but only love makes it worth while. Only love can cure it. Don’t be scared. Go. Love.

There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.

It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life “I used all my potential and all m

There were days when I still put on make up in case you’d come back,but I wear the same clothes and shower in the rainand eat when I can and sleep when I can,which is rare and not often,so if you’d see me nowon these streetswhere I once imagined walking with youyou’d have a hard time recognising me.I takes a lot to run away.

It could be yesterdaywhen I was less in loveI thinkFor I didn’t see you in the mirrorbehind mewhile getting dressed.The way your hands couldn’t stay awayand our bodies always found their ways back to each otheras if they were meant to be togetherClose.But then it was today and I saw you againin the mirrorbehind me while getting dressedSo I go to sleep tonightalonewithout actually falling asleep because I’m scared of the moment I will wake upand realise it was just a dreamYou’re actually gone.Now

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.

Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other.

And you might try to hide or protect yourself, or compare the different states of love,but you must not grow up, must not act wise when it comes to love.You must stay foolish and fall for every heart will beat in different ways together with yours and love is not meant to be compared, only enjoyed, and suffered, and remembered.

I used to be fine in my lonelinessbut somethingor someonesnapped me out of itand showed me company. What it’s like to feel at home,and so the going on by myself part wasn’t as easy anymore.Seasons happened and things got colder and harder and suddenly I found myself smoking circles in the airby myself in the snowand I was not okay.

I seek the city because there is nothing sweeter than not being alone in your loneliness.

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.

She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.

I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

There was a wildness inside him; someday he would capture it. Not to be tamed, but to be released. For only by understanding his mind could it be freed.

DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.Daddy, I have had to kill you.You died before I had time―Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,Ghastly statue with one grey toeBig as a Frisco sealAnd a head in the freakish AtlanticWhen it pours bean green over blueIn the waters of beautiful Nauset.I used to pray to recover you.Ach, du.In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rolle

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

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.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

He turns and walks away, moving so quickly that the candle flames shiver with the motion of the air. “I miss you,” Isobel says as he leaves, but the sentiment is crushed by the clatter of the beaded curtain falling closed behind him.

Juliet!' I whip around but not quickly enough. She's swallowed by the crowd, the gap that allowed her to break for the door closing just as quickly as it opened, a shifting Tetris pattern of bodies...

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion.

As his dark closet shows, Bluebeard was a collector at heart, and even after dispatching a wife, could not let her fully depart.

Feel no regret for roses, autumn too has its delights...How could she say that? Didn't she see that for us there could never be autumn, that we could never sit, as anyone else could sit, beside the fire all day on Sundays in November; that September's leaves, that fall for man and beast alike, were not our leaves to walk in; that October storms would never find us sharing an umbrella? The love of spring had thrived on wine and candles; now in the August of our lives, we needed newspapers and com

Prose lies its way to the truth

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.

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

Iverson glanced down at my white-knuckled grip, then at my eyes. A hint of a smile more subtle than a single flick of snow crossed his face, and his eyes nodded approval.

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