Prose Quotes
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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
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Prose is walking; poetry is flying...
Galway Kinnell
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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.
William Strunk, Jr.
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Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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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.
Michael Dirda
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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.
Ben Lerner
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...the best figurative poetry speaks not to the frivolous intellect, but (if anything does) straight to the heart; and does it better than plain prose. There seems then to be something which is better said with metaphor than without, which goes straighter to its mark by going crooked, and hits its aim exactly by flying off at tangents.
Austin Farrer
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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.
Leonard Alfred George Strong
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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
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All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book.
Donald Miller
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt
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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.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
Hilary Mantel
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The simple Wordsworth . . . / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.
Lord Byron
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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.
Alan Edwin Petty
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Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
Virginia Woolf
