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.
William Strunk, Jr.
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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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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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I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.
Robert Frost
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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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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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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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Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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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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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
Virginia Woolf
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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
