Prose Quotes
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Rather, very, little, pretty - these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one, and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.
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Prose is walking; poetry is flying...
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Peter Conners stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book- the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again.
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I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.
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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.
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In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (...) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.
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Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!
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Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!
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The simple Wordsworth . . . / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.
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Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
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You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.
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He turned then to Job, again using the King James's version. The translation from the Hebrew was narrower than the Greek but seemed more essential. It was the simple strong prose of men who believed and who were unafraid to name things.
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Prose is not necessarily good because it obeys the rules of syntax, but it is fairly certain to be bad if it ignores them.
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I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs.
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People and places are the source of my work, both in prose and verse-and this remark is not the truism it seems, for I do not distinguish as sharply between a place and a person as most people seem to do.
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
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I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
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All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book.
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Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing; the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.
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A short story is "a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal...having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out.
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Vathek has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.
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We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal...
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Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.
