Prose Quotes

“poetry is a magnet
to attract
all the broken hearts”
― Mehran Hashemi, Light Needs Darkness to Shine

“don't let the darkness
overcome your kindness”
― Mehran Hashemi, Light Needs Darkness to Shine

“we live in a world
without human rights
and that's why
human fights”
― Mehran Hashemi, Light Needs Darkness to Shine

“Poetry comes out of life.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“If one were to ask if Linus Baker was lonely, he would have scrunched up his face in surprise. The thought would be foreign, almost shocking. And though the smallest of lies hurt his head and made his stomach twist, there was a chance he would still say no, even though he was, and almost desperately so.
And maybe part of him would believe it. He'd accepted long ago that some people, no matter how good their heart was or how much love they had to give, would always be alone. It was their lot in life, and Linus had figured out, at the age of twenty-seven, that it seems to be that way for him.
Oh, there was no specific event that brought along this line of thinking. It was just that he felt...dimmer than others. Like he was faded in a crystal-clear world. He wasn't meant to be seen.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“. . . all she could think of now was getting back into that space of grass and sky and water.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Well, it’s like this. We choose to stay and to let go. We ask guidance from God with our choices. We align our desires to the opportunities presented. But sometimes, even if we want something or someone so badly, we just can’t have them.

Either circumstances do not allow it, or we are just not the choice.”
― Bella Coronel, Chasing Dandelions: A Collection of Prose and Poetry

“beautiful prose passage begins with, The unmanned beacon sat alone at the end of a long, meandering pier.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurring and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;--all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;--neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“[W]e need not whip these prose into poetry. The little language is enough. (191)”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The thrum of oviparous children of twilight pang like a jettisoned shadowy hand tattooed with god's eye in an anteroom”
― Harry Edgar Palacio, Sutras of Tiny Jazz

“The greatest of these drawbacks was not, perhaps, the limitation of the vocabulary, though undoubtedly this was a drawback. But it may be doubted whether the actual word-list, which is very far from inconsiderable, was insufficient for the tasks that it had to perform; and it possessed a power of compounding which, though English has not really lost it, modern precision has sadly hampered and hobbled. You may [...] go too far in the direction of substituting "star-witty man" for astrologer, and there really is no necessity to ostracise "penetration" in favour of "gothroughsomeness." But it is a great thing to be able to do these things when you like; and the languages which, like French, have surrendered, or mostly so, their franchise in tis respect have paid no small penalty.”
― George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm

“The prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness.”
― George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature

“Il joua avec cette idée, et s'y plongea tête baissée; il la jeta en l'air et la transforma; il la laissa s'échapper et la recaptura, il lui donna le chatoiement de la fantaisie et les ailes du paradoxe. L'éloge de la folie, à la mesure qu'il discourait, prit son essor et devint une philosophie, et la Philosophie elle-même devint jeune et, se laissant gagner par la musique déchaînée du Plaisir, portant, eût-on pu dire, robe tachée de vin et couronne de lierre, elle dansa telle une Bacchante par les collines de la vie, et railla le lourd Silène qui voulait rester sobre.”
― Oscar Wilde, Le Portrait de Dorian Gray & Salomé

“Cyrano: I'm sorry -

Christian: No you're not.
You love her - you want her -
now that's what you've got.
Shit-looking.

Cyrano: Christian.

Christian: Shit-looking. All this reading
she's done - this 'beauty evolves' - this needing
to quote your letters - this 'I don't care
what a man looks like'? Really? But of course that is where
you score so highly - the man with the nose.
And acres of highbrow wet-dream prose.

Cyrano: Wet-dream prose - that's not bad.

Christian: Yes, and I can do without the fucking writing lesson.

Both laugh a little, but tension remains.”
― Martin Crimp, Cyrano de Bergerac: in a free adaptation

“Refuse to honour the genius who has abused his gifts.”
― Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence

“Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“Have you sat on the leaf splattered bench, mid-way between skid-row and the rosy nose down death in the well-kept garden? Felt the wind’s blue grey call unbutton your coat as you squelch the rain from your rotten socks, persisted blurry eyed to know all of the forever far mystery of the countless towns, grimacing at something unspeakable, something buried in the beauty of all those lives, trying, striving, loving and dying running away to the coast to doom to the tomb and the sea, dreamt winter and the candles burning, put your knapsack behind your head and dwelt skyward, feeling the sweet heavy lull of those million lives never known? Have you known your great winding road, those two feet upon the brown earth and smelt the ghost of chance and time riding by relentlessly in the golden fields? Busted your nose in fisticuffs and let some coward have it, then picked him back up and bought him a drink? Forever believed in the sweet sad lonely expression of Man’s days? Of death as nothing, just a cool and bitter forlorn Wednesday in October, the end, but the old brown earth forever there. Have you picked up a pebble and sent it seaward, back upon the endless circle of tide and moon high, moon glad, stirrings of mad nights and lonely fate, lonesome be all our days, ephemeral but joyful for it.”
― Samuel J Dixey

“If we are to write the script of our lives with wisdom we must put down the pen, set the paper aside and ask not ‘what do I want to do,’ but ‘what should I do?’ For the latter is a script penned in prose littered with tragedy, and the former is a script penned with lines rich with triumph.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“As I walk home, doubting each step before I make it, I am agnostic. Before I close my eyes to sleep, I am a Christian. When I wake, pulled from the pool still reflecting the penumbra, I am spiritual, I am thankful”
― Derek Owusu, That Reminds Me

“I’m watching the day through a breeze blown slice in my curtains, obscuring nothing but my hour, summer and wind making peace, moving the leaves in the trees standing guard by my window, nervous after my attempts, the sun stroking fronds but leaving others in shadows, seeing the movement of the branches but hearing nothing but the serene sound of cars beyond the garden, limbs waving to me as a bird perches, maybe scouting for a house, onto the bough scratching the glass, knocking to bring me out into contentment while tiny flies shoot in and out of view, their quick existence something I could argue as I smell the fresh air through the dour scent of a depression that hasn’t left my room in days, then swiftly feeling like I’m outside, alive and welcoming the wind to raise the hairs on my arms, a contrast that blossoms into hope.”
― Derek Owusu, That Reminds Me

“Anansi, your four gift s raised to Nyame grant you no power over the stories I tell, stories that build like dew, alerting you but creating no music when they drop onto the drums of our sky. Take my ‘gift ’, words bound in time, directly to him and tell me if his features betray recognition or sorrow.”
― Derek Owusu, That Reminds Me

“Anansi, your four gifts raised to Nyame grant you no power over the stories I tell, stories that build like dew, alerting you but creating no music when they drop onto the drums of our sky. Take my ‘gift ’, words bound in time, directly to him and tell me if his features betray recognition or sorrow.”
― Derek Owusu, That Reminds Me

“A conversation with amnesia on the navel of ash and dust, the thought of leaving familiar to longing. We saw the last days on neon orange steppes and the codex was written in indecipherable lines of the palm.”
― Harry Edgar Palacio, Punt Volat

“-"And you that sit by the fire are young, And true love waits for you; But the king and I grow old, grow old, And hate alone is true." - Ballad of the White Horse: Book III. The Harp of Alfred”
― G. K. Chesterton

“In prose... at any moment the door will open, someone will enter, something will happen. In poetry, the description itself must happen.”
― Wisława Szymborska, How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers

“I can't remember if I managed to smile back at him. I can't remember anymore.”
― Athira Krishnakumar

“Grief is a small cup of tea in the evening
I come back to it everyday.”
― Devika Todi, Sun On My Hands: A Poetry and Prose Collection

“... I want things plain. Or direct. When I read a book I’m suspicious of description. Too much embellishment or an excess of adjectives bothers me, as if the speaker or writer were attempting to overcome me, to finesse me like a bridge player. Or to seduce me.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“The first wind of winter blew from the north, and it had ice and rime on its breath.

It was dirty and sharp and it cut like a razor, and if it touched you, you could wash and wash until your skin was tattered and bloodied, but you'd never be clean again.

It scattered them in the night, the quiet ones with death in their eyes.

But they left more tentatively than they had come, as if they had seen something unholy inside themselves; something they would never be able to forget.

And they left, slowly, one by one, with reluctance, leaving the safety of the light for the chill certainties of the darkness.

It seemed like the night sucked them up, took them into its dark heart.

It seemed like the darkness swallowed them...

Perhaps it did.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman #14: Collectors