Beautiful Prose Quotes

In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar. ~ Will Schwalbe

I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone. ~ Chris Howard

A distant, eerie howl had risen out of the floor, from far beneath. Silent, absolutely still, she waited, and at last it came again, indefinably closer, but muffled, as if layers of stone-rooms, dungeons, cellars-were between her and it. Not human. She crouched down with her ear to the stone slabs. Somewhere down there, unguessable levels below,something prowled. ~ Catherine Fisher

Merrie Destefano storms the world of urban fantasy with AFTERLIFE, breathing new life into the vast genre of the undead. Gritty, poignant, in the tradition of Bladerunner, with the nostalgia of New Orleans. With crisp and beautiful prose, AFTERLIFE blurs the line between the living and the dead to ask life's ultimate questions-even if they take nine lives to solve. ~ Tosca Lee

It was a sumptuous, oh, truly sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue, the countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its own reflection in the still surface of the lake. It was the kind of day on which, latterly, the sun for me is the world's fat eye looking on in rich enjoyment as I writhe in misery. ~ John Banville

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing. ~ John Fowles

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American. ~ Harold Bloom

But aren't all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos
we know what's out there. It's what isn't that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet lags
four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon
but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant
sail for Asia and stumble on America
and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along. ~ Jess Walter

I think you can talk forever about style, technique and beautiful prose, but surely in the final analysis one thing matters above all else - is it a page-turner? ~ Jamie Holoran

The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day. ~ Shannon Hale

One thing she realized soon was that the rain here was eternal. The weather must have changed since the Emperor's time, because now the tower loomed constantly in its cloud of drizzle; all the long afternoons rain trickled in runnels and gutters and spouts, spattering through gargoyles of hideous beasts and goblins that spat far down on the heads of hurrying clerks. Always the roofs ran with water; it dripped and plopped and splashed through culverts and drains, or sheeted down, a relentless liquid gurgle that never stopped, until she started to imagine that this was the song the tower sang, through all the throats and mouths and pipes of its endless body. ~ Catherine Fisher

Beautiful prose is a floundering fish if it doesn't have a story to swim in. ~ Kevin Ansbro

She stood watching a ritual she had seen many times before, yet which now seemed odd and extremely archaic; as if everything - the hill, the ox, the Mage, the cauldron, the king, the people looking on - everything belonged to a time so far away, so obscurely ancient that it could no longer be comprehended, only felt in the pulse of blood that flowed through her veins. ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

The kiss wasn't a buildup to something else; it wasn't a promise of more to come – it couldn't be. Just a sweet, sad acknowledgment that this was something beautiful that could never be. ~ Brynn Kelly

All that we had, every moment we shared, it meant everything to me. Everything you felt, I felt it, too. It was the hardest thing to do, to walk away from you, from us, but I had to do it, because you deserve so much more. And I hope you see that. I hope that you've moved on and found some guy who treats you like the amazingly beautiful girl you are. And that he knows how lucky he is to have you. I hope he appreciates every single thing about you. And I hope that he loves you and gives you the world, Amanda. Because I would have. ~ Jay McLean

Wendy Belle wasn't the type of model foreign princes married. Yes, tall and graceful, but she didn't radiate a Grace Kelly-like cold beauty. Her lips were too sensuous for that, her eyes too mysterious. Her face was beautiful and perfect in its own way. More than beautiful - interesting. She was the type of woman a man could look at for a lifetime and not get bored. ~ Dana Marton

Oh my gosh," Somer whispers, one hand flying up to her mouth. "She's beautiful."
Krishnan fumbles with the papers and reads, "Asha. That's her name. Ten months old."
"What does it mean?" she asks.
"Asha? Hope." He looks up at her, smiling. "It means hope."
"Really?" She gives a little laugh, crying as well. "Well, she must be ours then."
She grasps his hand, intertwining their fingers, and kisses him.
"That's perfect, really perfect."
She rests her head on his shoulder as they stare at the photo together.
For the first time in a very long time, Somer feels a lightness in her chest. How can it be I'm already in love with this child, half a world away? The next morning, they send a telegram to the orphanage, stating they are coming to get their daughter. ~ Shilpi Somaya Gowda

You are the stuff of which consumer profiles – American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model – are made. When you're staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn't it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine? ~ Jay McInerney

The Beautiful is the expression of the absolute Spirit, which is truth itself. This region of Divine truth as artistically presented to perception and feeling, forms the center of the whole world of Art. It is a self-contained, free, divine formation which has completely appropriated the elements of external form as material, and which employs them only as the means of manifesting itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Yes, Em, your freckles are perfect. Looks are a funny thing, very peculiar. Never waste any time disliking the ones you have. The right person will think they are the very definition of beautiful. ~ Rachel Fordham

Life is a beautiful struggle.. ~ Talib Kweli

In addition to being the most beautiful score I have ever sung, 'Piazza' gave me the opportunity to honor the matriarchs of my Southern family. ~ Victoria Clark

You can put up with everything in this world except not with a long stretch of beautiful days. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

He cupped her cheek, the muscles of his forearm burning with the slow thrusts inside her. "You're beautiful." Unable to have even a few inches between them, he caught her mouth, swallowing her moans. Cheek to cheek, he dragged in her scent. Murmuring her name, he held her as she broke. ~ Taryn Elliott

When, shortly afterward, I stopped at the top of the hill and saw the town beneath me, my feeling of happiness was so ecstatic that I didn't know how I would be able to make it home, sit there and write, eat, or sleep. But the world is constructed in such a way that it meets you halfway in moments precisely like these, your inner joy seeks an outer counterpart and finds it, it always does, even in the bleakest regions of the world, for nothing is as relative as beauty. Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something else, inconceivable to us, as we don't know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs, and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although it's not necessary, the world is the world, it's all we have. So as I walked down the steps toward the town center on this Wednesday at the end of August I had a place in my heart for everything I beheld. A slab of stone worn smooth in a flight of steps: fantastic. A swaybacked roof side by side with an austere perpendicular brick building: so beautiful. A limp hot-dog wrapper on a drain grille, which the wind lifts a couple of meters and then drops again, this time on the pavement flecked with white stepped-on chewing gum: incredible. A ~ Knausgaard, Karl Ove

You are very beautiful, Aglaya Ivanovna, so beautiful that one is afraid to look at you. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I think I'm beginning to understand
how hearts fit together.
Not like diseased carnations that lean against their crutches.
Not like vines that twine tight, throttling their hosts.
But like two trees:
two systems of deep, untangled roots,
two patterns of flowering branches,
whose leaves drink their own sunlight
and breathe their own air.
Two trees with something slung between them,
a hammock or a tapestry or a swing,
some third, beautiful thing
that neither would die without.
Hearts fit together like hands.
Not by necessity.
By choice. ~ Riley Redgate

When the Guard convinced you fate was not on our side, you parted ways with me and saw fit to make me suffer,' Percy stated. The pain on Alexi's face worsened, and he opened his mouth to refute her. She put her hands lovingly on his cheeks. 'We survived. Our love survived. And we shall again.'
He stared at her in wonder. 'How did my dear girl grow so brave?'
Percy grinned. 'Didn't you hear? The meek shall inherit the earth. ~ Leanna Renee Hieber

The beautiful thing about the truth of being is that it's so unimaginably immediate. ~ Adyashanti

She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a state or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

If only mortals would learn how great it is to possess divine grace, how beautiful, how noble, how precious. How many riches it hides within itself, how many joys and delights! No one would complain about his cross or about troubles that may happen to him, if he would come to know the scales on which they are weighed when they are distributed to men. ~ Rose Of Lima

As a young woman, when she had been beautiful and had worn her hair short and her clothes loose to conceal that fact, she had known all the signs of men and read them well enough that she had been successfully robbed only three times and raped once; but none of those had burned from her the hunger for empty spaces, strange cities, new oceans. ~ Kij Johnson

It is their nature, beautiful and simple. That you would destroy such beings, Mr. Lincoln, such superior creatures, seems madness to me."
"That you speak of them with such reverence, Mr. Poe, seems madness to me."
"Can you imagine it? Can you imagine seeing the universe through such eyes? Laughing in the face of time and death - the world your Garden of Eden? Your library? Your harem? ~ Seth Grahame-Smith

When a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry. ~ Sybil Marshall

They believe that objects have souls. The more love you put into one, the more beautiful it becomes. ~ Marie Lu

And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Dorian, I have wings!"
"I can see that."
"What am I?" I asked, as chills ran up my spine.
"I - I can't be positive, because I have never seen one. But I think you're a phoenix," he said in amazement. "You are so beautiful. ~ Karen Gammons

One beautiful day, a radiant day, Mr Abramovich introduced himself to me and said I should put a shopping list together ~ Claudio Ranieri

I don't explain love, Bart. I don't think anyone can. It grows from day to day from having contact with that other person who understands your needs, and you understand theirs. It starts with a faltering flutter that touches your heart and makes you vulnerable to everything beautiful. ~ V.C. Andrews

I knew all about the importance of dressmakers, because I'd spent my childhood with a woman permanently torn between the necessity of possessing beautiful clothes and the difficulty of paying for them. ~ Orson Welles

How beautiful would history have been if it could be written beforehand and then acted out like drama! ~ Aihebholo-oria Okonoboh

Elegance comes from being as beautiful inside as outside. ~ Coco Chanel

There is always a beautiful light around the compassionate people: The shining light of goodness! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Of course. The team on your carriage was beautiful. They are yours, aren't they?"
He ignored her and walked ahead until his foot connected with soft mushy ground. "Shit," he muttered.
"Exactly."
He glared at her, thinking himself a saint for not going for her throat. ~ Julia Quinn

I think what drives scientists is this tremendous intellectual adventure - pushing the boundaries of knowledge, walking down a track that nobody has walked down before, not knowing what's around the corner and then seeing a landscape that is so extraordinarily beautiful and complex, being part of the community that is driving the boundaries of knowledge and giving us insight into the amazing process of life. ~ Suzanne Cory

Beautiful is dangerous. ~ Neal Shusterman

In comedy, it's not the glamorous, beautiful people that are great at comedy. They're either every man or every woman, they're either quite tall and lanky or shorter and fatter or have a big nose. They have something physically about them that makes them into a comic stereotype. ~ Rebel Wilson

Logan?"
I'm so distracted by my musings, I miss her speaking my name, and for a bit, I don't say anything at all.
"Oh well, it'll grow back," she says, embarrassment flushing beneath her cheeks. "Wearing a hat for the next six months won't be so bad."
I force the gravel from my throat. "Beautiful."
Ellie's eyes flick back to mine. "What?"
I hold her gaze, my tone deliberate and sure. "You look beautiful, Ellie."
Her smile is small and seeking. "Really?"
I don't take my eyes off her. I wouldn't - even if I could. "Prettiest lass I've ever seen. ~ Emma Chase

It's better to like beautiful girls than to be gay. ~ Silvio Berlusconi

When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life. Not mine, at any rate. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Tigers fascinated me for so many reasons. They're strong and fierce, but also beautiful and elegant. I remember loving the way they moved, how they were able to control their power. I would spend hours staring at their faces and drawing them: the eyes could display such a range of emotion. I loved that they have no fear. When they walk through a jungle, they own it. ~ Derek Hough

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros's work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us. ~ Andre Breton

It's strange how many ways there are to miss someone. You miss the things they did and who they were, but you also miss who you were to them. The way everything you said and did was beautiful or entertaining or important. How much you mattered ~ Robin Roe

I wish continued success to the Foundation. You're doing an important job to help what is called 'the beautiful game'. You're helping it to expand at every level. I will always remember this very special night in Washington, D.C. ~ Lamar Hunt