Prose Quotes
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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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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
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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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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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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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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.
Judy Collins
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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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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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We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal...
Edgar Allan Poe
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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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Prose will be used for the more objective branches of writing- novels, plays, essays..Cadence will be used for personal, emotional, lyrical utterances in which the phrasing goes with a stronger beat and the words live together with an intense flame.
F.S. Flint
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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.
William Lewis Safir
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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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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.
William Thomas Beckford
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The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.
William Shenstone