Prose Quotes

1. "All men believe in the soul and act accordingly, even if they do not always speak up. If somebody has committed a murder and admits it, but insists that he did it unintentionally, what follows then with the prosecutor, the defense, the witnesses, the experts, and the court? Why do they deliver learned speeches, analyze every detail, and so on, when the very deed has been admitted to and its consequences are evident? All their efforts are not concerned with external objective facts, but with an inner problem: that of intention. It is not a question of what actually happened, but what happened in the heart of the murderer. Moreover, everyone involved in the case spontaneously believes that the intention is more important than the consequences. That means that everyone, maybe unconsciously, prefers the soul to the facts."
Author: Alija Izetbegovic

2. "Finally, a good prosecutor knows that her job is to enforce the law without fear or favor. Likewise, a Supreme Court Justice must interpret the laws without fear or favor."
Author: Amy Klobuchar

3. "[I] settled down with the Daily News and the Post, glad to be back with journalism where all murders are "brutal," all prosecutors are "tough," and all blondes are "attractive." And any lawyer who cooperates with the reporter is "high-powered."
Author: Andrew Vachss

4. "In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me."
Author: Ben Marcus

5. "I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular."
Author: Blaise Cendrars

6. "Yes, I prosecute bastards like him, make them pay for what they did to innocent victims who can't fight for themselves. And every time I win a case, I not only win for the victim, but also for me."
Author: Buffy Andrews

7. "An author never lies. We do, however tend to speak in a fictional prose."
Author: Carl Henegan

8. "For too long, musicians have been the greatest enemy of music. Their lack of desire to proselytize is a kind of betrayal."
Author: Charles Hazlewood

9. "The U.S. prosecution service is eating at the soul of the American republic. It is an absolute danger to everyone."
Author: Conrad Black

10. "So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my mind, they were a whole lot better."Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind."
Author: David Morrell

11. "My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell."
Author: David Simon

12. "My job as a television anchor or television reporter is not to proselytize."
Author: Deborah Norville

13. "For me, creative energy is like an old-fashioned ground-water well. When the well is dry, it's dry. I can dig all I like, and all I'll get for my pains is sore hands, some very bad prose, and maybe (if I'm lucky) a few odd droplets of notes I can actually use. Or not. It's usually not worth it. After many years, I've discovered that it's better to wait until some ground water seeps back into the well rather than to try and lick up every drop as it emerges."
Author: Delia Sherman

14. "There have been high crimes and misdemeanors, but they have been committed by the special prosecutor and the Congress, not the president."
Author: Donella Meadows

15. "Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair."
Author: E.B. White

16. "Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

17. "OF writing many books there is no end;And I who have written much in prose and verseFor others' uses, will write now for mine,-Will write my story for my better self,As when you paint your portrait for a friend,Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at itLong after he has ceased to love you, justTo hold together what he was and is."
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

18. "The journey through another world, beyond bad dreamsbeyond the memories of a murdered generation,cartographed in captivity by bare survivorsmakes sacristans of us all.The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes.Be careful, they say, don't hock the beads of kinship agonies; the moire-effect of unfamiliar hymnsupon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voicetransforms the ways of song to words of poetry or proseand makes distinctionsno one recognizes.Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscanson the edge of useless law; we prayto the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistlein ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chainof incense burners. Migration makes new citizens of Rome."
Author: Elizabeth Cook Lynn

19. "Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over."
Author: Ernest Hemingway

20. "This benign property of his prose is not, one hopes, to be attributed to the reason noticed by the eccentric du Garbandier, who said 'the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest'."
Author: Flann O'Brien

21. "Prose talks and poetry sings."
Author: Franz Grillparzer

22. "It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"
Author: G.K. Chesterton

23. "Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane."
Author: George Orwell

24. "Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory."
Author: George William Curtis

25. "In reality, Hemingway didn't appeal to plumbers or roofers who read books; he was a rich man's writer, with the vocabulary and hunting instinct of the blue-collar workingman. But Hemingway had the unfailing genius of an inventor, and each book he wrote was new, sparkling new, something that hadn't been seen in American prose, something that merged common speech with uncommon clarity, something that verged on poetry."
Author: Gerald Hausman

26. "Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist's general disposition to vibrate"
Author: Henry James

27. "Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony."
Author: Horace Walpole

28. "I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing."
Author: Howard Hodgkin

29. "The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs. One was less than a wolf: he was a public prosecutor. The other was more than a pig, he was a chief commissioner of police."
Author: Jan Neruda

30. "I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose."
Author: Jeffery Deaver

31. "I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else." The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before."
Author: Joanne Greenberg

32. "Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose."
Author: Jonathan Raban

33. "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."
Author: Leonard Alfred George Strong

34. "« Par ma foi ! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien, et je vous suis le plus obligé du monde de m'avoir appris cela. »"
Author: Molière

35. "Poetry is prose in slow motion."
Author: Nicholson Baker

36. "Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking."
Author: Paul Valéry

37. "Reading may be the last secretive behavior that is neither pathological or prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real. Story strips its reader, holding her in a place time can't reach. A book's power lies in its ability to erase us, to expand or contract without limit, to circle inside itself without beginning or end, to defy our imaginary timetables and lay us bare to a more basic ticking. The pages we read are a nowhen, unfolding far outside the public arena. As long as we remain in them, now reveals itself to be the baldest of inventions."
Author: Richard Powers

38. "Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat."
Author: Robert Graves

39. "And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts."
Author: Robert Jay Lifton

40. "Alangkah seringnya Mentergesai kenikmatan tanpa ikatan Membuat detik-detik di depan terasa hambar Belajar dari ahli puasa Ada dua kebahagiaan baginya Saat berbuka Dan saat Allah menyapa lembut memberikan pahala Inilah puasa panjang syahwatku Kekuatan ada pada menahan Dan rasa nikmat itu terasa, di waktu buka yang penuh kejutan Coba saja Kalau Allah yang menghalalkan Setitis cicipan surga Kan menjadi shadaqah berpahala Buku ini dipersembahkan untuk mereka yang lagi jatuh hati atau sedang pacaran bersama doi yang dipenuhi hasrat nikah dini tapi belum bernyali yang sedang menjalani proses penuh liku dan yang ingin melanggengkan masa-masa indah pernikahannya..."
Author: Salim Akhukum Fillah

41. "The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy."
Author: Sonya Renee Taylor

42. "Neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth -- that's the way home.neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves -- that's youth and that's love.neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night -- so the rope, paper, knife."
Author: Tadeusz Borowski

43. "My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose."
Author: Tao Lin

44. "[We] all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry."
Author: Theodore Roosevelt

45. "Whoever will take the trouble of reading the book ascribed to Isaiah, will find it one of the most wild and disorderly compositions ever put together; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end; and, except a short historical part, and a few sketches of history in the first two or three chapters, is one continued incoherent, bombastical rant, full of extravagant metaphor, without application, and destitute of meaning; a school-boy would scarcely have been excusable for writing such stuff; it is (at least in translation) that kind of composition and false taste that is properly called prose run mad."
Author: Thomas Paine

46. "Semakin bersedia seseorang untuk menilai sesuatu dari sudut pandang orang lain yang berbeda, maka semakin beragamlah perspektifnya terhadap sesuatu tersebut.Semakin beragam perspektifnya terhadap sesuatu tersebut, maka semakin dekatlah persepsinya dengan kebenaran utuh dan apa adanya akan sesuatu tersebut. Inilah proses pembentukan sikap objektif dalam diri manusia."
Author: Toba Beta

47. "Niko? I have decided to christen this little pool Le Cagot's Soul.""Oh?""Yes. Because it is clear and pure and lucid.""And treacherous and dangerous?""You know, Niko, I begin to suspect that you are a man of prose. It is a blemish on you.""No one's perfect.""Speak for yourself."
Author: Trevanian

48. "She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose."
Author: Virginia Woolf

49. "There was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house - be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room - and that was to have your face buried in a book. Like churches during the Middle Ages, books conferred instant sanctuary. Once you entered one, you couldn't be disturbed. They didn't give you immunity from prosecution if you'd done something wrong - just a temporary reprieve. But we quickly learned you had to both look and be completely engrossed - just flipping pages didn't count."
Author: Will Schwalbe

50. "Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating."
Author: William Strunk Jr.

Prose Quotes Pictures