Prose Quotes
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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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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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!
Moliere
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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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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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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt
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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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Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan
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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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Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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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.
Wilson Follett
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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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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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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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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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Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.
Tommy Lee Jones
