Descriptive Prose Quotes

[T]welve year old Libby O'Shea coasted on a homemade swing, toes touching a blinding-blue heaven dolloped with clouds. ~ Julie Lessman

I look at him and my body reacts in a way that it never has before, even in the throes of passion. I look at him and I start aching so deep inside it takes all I can to think, to breathe, to speak. He's like the brightest flame and it takes everything in me to resist its call.

I know that if I give in, I'll get burned so deeply, there might be nothing left once I come out the other side.

But, god, I want to step into that flame. ~ D.L. Hess

The owner of the Post Office was called Maurice. A sixtyish-year-old with a large red nose that was pebble-dashed with broken capillaries, and a smooth bald head with a fuzz of grey hair around the side like the tide mark on a dirty bath. He had a gruff manner, distrusting eyes and a cough like kicked gravel. ~ R.D. Ronald

Ye examined Feng. The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm. The glow from the kerosene lamp painted her figure with vivid, warm colors, while the rest of the room dissolved into a gentle darkness. Close attention revealed a dim red glow, which didn't come from the kerosene lamp, but the heating charcoal on the ground. The cold air outside sculpted beautiful ice patterns on the windowpanes with the room's warm, humid air. ~ Liu Cixin

The blast of hot air lifted Tazeem from his feet and threw him onto his back in the road. He blinked up into the night sky; raindrops glowed orange as they fell towards the earth. ~ R.D. Ronald

He dropped the phone back onto its cradle, began to turn around and felt a sudden ice-cold furrow open up in his side. Strength drained from his legs, and a moment later he sank to his knees. There was warmth now that ran over the initial and persistent cold.
Mohammed was confused, and barely noticed the briefcase being removed from his grip. He heard the click of a cell phone opening, and a soft beeping as a number was dialed.
'The package is in my possession,' a female voice said, and the phone clicked shut. ~ R.D. Ronald

A bruised silence descended on the van. ~ Hillary Jordan

Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red. ~ R.D. Ronald

the tall white windmills that came to her mind. How their skinny long arms all turned, but never together, except for just once in a while two of them would be turning the same way, their arms poised at the same place in the sky. ~ Elizabeth Strout

Dave was a confirmed serotonin junkie. Any day of the year, he chose a good book, a hot cupper, and air-conditioning over jeopardy to life and limb. ~ Dan Sofer

The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river
it's in the pores of the place
but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It's a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches.
This is the kind of place you don't come to unless you've been here before and all your other options are pretty much foreclosed. It's a place where men who left their families two decades before now lie on narrow beds with pee-stained mattresses, coughing and smoking cigarettes. ~ Stephen King

Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become. ~ Shirley A. Martin

Sweeping the dorm soon's it's empty, I'm after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that the big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells - smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they're fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair - but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work. ~ Ken Kesey

Night came early to this neighborhood, the sun fleeing the sky, leaving heaven black and blue. ~ Lisa Scottoline

Her shoes were comfortable. They reflected her hope for the evening. ~ William Peter Blatty

Because of the foulness of her mother's emotional river, a current which ran swift, changing its path without warning ... ~ Tamara Rose Blodgett

She hit him in the best way, like a rainstorm after five years of drought, healing the parched earth with a gentle touch; and in the worst way,like an unexpected earthquake,leaving dust and debris in her wake. She was, in equal parts, a gift and a natural disaster. Her name was Juniper Jones. ~ Daven McQueen

How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that's been shaken. There's a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it's now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris. (p30) ~ Craig Silvey

A shaft of moonlight illuminated a row of sentinel silver birch in a phosphorescent glow, appearing almost ethereal in the relative surrounding gloom. Boris had stopped again, his silhouette a stark black juxtaposition against the background of illuminated branches. ~ R.D. Ronald

A shrieking battle cry echoed on the wind, a spine-tingling scream that sounded like the baying of the wolves closing in on their prey. ~ Raymond E. Feist

Some people will tell you that Toronto, in the summer, is the nothing more than a cesspool of pollution, garbage, and the smells of a hundred ethnicities competing for top spot in a race won historically by curry, garlic, and the occasional cauldron of boiled cabbage. Take a walk down College Street West, Gerrard Street East, or the Danforth, and you'll see; then, they add - these people, complaining - that the stench is so pervasive, so incorrigible, nor merely for lack of wind, but for the ninety-nine percent humidity, which, after a rainstorm, adds an eradicable bottom-note of sweaty Birkenstocks and the organic tang of decaying plant life. This much is true; there is, however, more to the story. Take a walk down the same streets and you'll find racks of the most stunning saris - red with navy brocade, silver, canary, vermillion and chocolate; marts with lahsun and adrak, pyaz and pudina; windows of gelato, zeppole, tiramisu; dusty smoke shops with patio-bistros; you'll find dove-white statuary of Olympian goddesses, mobs in blue jerseys, primed for the World Cup - and more, still, the compulsory banter of couples who even after forty years can turn foul words into the bawdiest, more unforgettable laughter (and those are just the details). Beyond them is the container, the big canvas brushed with parks and valleys and the interminable shore; a backdrop of ferries and islands, gulls and clouds - sparkles of a million wave-tips as the sun decides which colours to leave on it ~ Cory Ingram

Some scents sparkle and then quickly disappear, like the effervescence of ctirus zestor a bright note of mint. ~ Deborah Lawrenson

In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the under side, translating them into a new language. ~ E.B. White

In the light from the rising moon, a miniature statue shimmered on a pedestal: a statue of a dragon, carved from an enormous emerald. He nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to reach it. He stretched out his hands. His mouth went dry. A dazzling light flooded the room as a door swung open. Toad froze. His stomach dropped through the floor. His arms were still raised, inches from the statue, but his eyes were transfixed upon the giant figure standing in the doorway. ~ M.L. LeGette

Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, toasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood.) For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home.
The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire, until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its size in a meal of scraps of meat. ~ Neil Gaiman

Around the outside of the room other beautiful women wearing little or nothing at all flitted between the infatuated, intoxicated men, sometimes luring them away for a private dance. The men would follow obediently, weighed down by lust and credit cards. ~ R.D. Ronald

Somewhere deep inside, his humanity had been shaken by something so unnatural, so foreign in its essence, his very being withdrew from it ... ~ Tamara Rose Blodgett

If the onset of wrinkles in middle age were referred to as laughter lines, then to look at him, Scott thought, Twinkle's life must have been hilarious. He had sharp eyes that often seemed to visually contradict the lack of intelligence that could be derived from listening to him talk. There might not be a lot to respect in Twinkle, but Scott liked him. He just didn't want to end up like him. ~ R.D. Ronald

The sun, like a boil on the bright blue ass of day, rolled gradually forward and spread its legs wide to reveal the pubic thatch of night, a hairy darkness in which stars crawled like lice, and the moon crabbed slowly upward like an albino dog tick striving for the anal gulch. ~ Joe R. Lansdale

After a week he was moved to a different wing and into a shared six-by-eight with a grizzled old con called Alf. He had faded tattoos that stained most of the visible skin on his hands, arms and neck a dull blue, sharp eyes and a thick beard that made his mouth look like an axe wound on a bear. ~ R.D. Ronald

This was the neighborhood of the cheap addicts, whisky-heads, stumblebums, the flotsam of Harlem; the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn't anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal - always running, ducking and dodging. God help them if they got caught. Listless mothers stood in the dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debts, their Gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with the numbers and the evilness of white people. Workingmen staggered down the sidewalks filled with aimless resentment, muttering curses, hating to go to their hotbox hovels but having nowhere else to go. ~ Chester Himes

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. ~ Sinclair Lewis

The bar staff and croupiers all wore black with the same green triangle logo emblazoned on their shirts, and contact lenses which made their eyes shine an eerie, vibrant green. The bar optics glowed with the same green light, the intensity of which was linked to the music. As the bartender walked away to fetch the drinks, a breakdown in the techno track commenced and the bottles began to palpitate. The bartender's eyes glowed with a hallucinatory felinity that made Mangle feel nervous. ~ R.D. Ronald

And it sounds like two tectonic plates are getting it on somewhere beneath us ~ Daniel Jose Older

The chairs - turned towards one another in groups of twos and threes - seemed like the seats of ghosts in close conversation with one another. There were sets of two chairs - very close to one another - in the far corners of the room, which spoke of recent whispered flirtations, over cold game pie and iced champagne; there were sets of three and four chairs, that recalled pleasant animated discussions over the latest scandals; there were chairs straight up in a row that still looked starchy, critical, acid, like antiquated dowagers; there were a few isolated, single chairs, close to the table, that spoke of gourmands intent on the most recherche dishes, and others overturned on the floor, that spoke volumes on the subject of my Lord Grenville's cellars. ~ Emmuska Orczy

A voice called out, cold as chloroform and old shame. ~ Scott Lynch

Even as winter comes, mornings are crisp, and the big, blue sky seems to hang newly washed over the sea of hills. ~ Deborah Lawrenson

His skin was blotched as a dying banana. ~ David Mitchell

The two events were probably unrelated, but both jolted Dave the way a sudden air pocket reminds nervous passengers that they're soaring above the clouds in a pressurized metal tube. ~ Dan Sofer

Los Angeles is seven suburbs in search of a city. ~ Alexander Woollcott

The oak trees had shed their leaves, revealing the inky thumbprints of crows' nests in the crackle glaze of dark branches. ~ Kevin Ansbro

I was writing up a New Mexico snow-storm, I had it coming down thick and heavy, muffling the roads and mounding on adobe walls and windowsills and whitening the piñon and junipers when the tapping came on the door. ~ Wallace Stegner

The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape-shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read. ~ Aminatta Forna

Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying. ~ Noam Chomsky

The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen. ~ Pattiann Rogers

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

He appreciated all beautiful things. As she stood before him poised, scrutinizing every inch of his face, liable to strike him, he thought she was the most incredible thing he had seen in his life. She didn't step away from fear, she walked up to it. ~ Nicki Salcedo

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. ~ John Berger

We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp. ~ Brian D. McLaren

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. ~ Herman Melville

Because I write prose, when I sat down to write a comic, it feels like my brain's working differently. It actually feels like different bits of my head are springing into action. ~ Denise Mina

A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical. ~ Paul Dirac

Do You Believe
... on this road of life
on this day
I take you
now husband and wife ... ~ Muse

and sadness clung to me
because she did not know
how to be alone. ~ AVA.

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'. ~ Flann O'Brien

I know a lot of Eastern Europeans, and because of what they have been through and what they have seen, they have an attitude where they are not easily fooled. ~ Francine Prose

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I like to move around in the landscape between poetry and prose, between the lyrical and the narrative. ~ Rigoberto Gonzalez

A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas. As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one's mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane. And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed. ~ Adam Zagajewski

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books. ~ Francine Prose

They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Aeolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule. ~ Stendhal

Fiery red curls catch my attention. I've never seen hair like hers. It's long and hangs to just above her ass, but it's not trashy looking. The curls are large and thick. If I were a descriptive man, I'd almost call her hair luscious. But, I'm not so I'll leave it at fiery and thick. ~ Rein Scott

Greta's cedar hope chest
Is full of pamphlets
Glass shelves of romantic vignettes
A journal laced with sedimentary prose
Norma gathers and collects vintage photoplays
Hair combs valentines
Lillian allows the animals to scratch
And the leather crack
And the mail collect in the box as coatings peel
Agnes veiled cathedral dweller
Smiles with benevolent pain

But it's Katrina's fair
Tuesday morning
As she with caution unlatches the flat door
She alone cascades to the basement
Careful not to spoil her
Calico printed pinafore
Composite traits and mannerists
All others dissipate

Marguerite vigilant
She dwells upon frigid casements
Sarah's thoughts in high velocity
Accusations always pierce and pass
Clara abandons her passions for distastes
A Miss Lenora P. Sinclair
Early for coffee in the pool
"I'm resituating all your words"
Capital Space Colon Paragraph

Sylvia keeps beasts in jars labeled by
Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family
Genus
Species

But it's Katrina's fair
Tuesday morning
As she with caution unlatches the flat door
She alone cascades to the basement
Careful not to spoil her
Calico printed pinafore
Composite traits and mannerists
All others dissipate

Down the way a silk design
This face is mine
Tis I, Ka ~ Natalie Merchant

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to w ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It had been communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of women that a female's nose must never shine. In war, in famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick without the requisite face powder. … I was taunted by the problem: how could someone write something like the 'Symposium' and make sure her nose did not shine at the same time? It didn't matter to me that I was reading a translation. I'd read Plato's brilliant, dense prose and not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose. It didn't hurt, it didn't make noise, it didn't incapacitate in any way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Don't say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. ~ William Zinsser

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower ~ Michael Longley

Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose. ~ Winston Churchill

i am learning that when love wants to stay it will stay.
i am learning that when love wants to go it will go. ~ AVA.

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays ... , more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more ... Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. ~ Rebecca Solnit

if god is real, she put all of herself into this girl. she vowed to unleash a woman so violently herself, the sky would collapse every time she came to orgasm. ~ Taylor Rhodes

When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium. ~ Truman Capote

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts. ~ Elizabeth Peyton

I never wrote poetry, just prose. I don't really consider songwriting a form of poetry either. The words are important, of course, but they're dependent on the music. ~ Michael Gira

If I look closely, I bet I could see my own past, lying on the floor somewhere between the ancient jukebox and the pool table. ~ Kol Anderson

Always be a poet, even in prose. ~ Charles Baudelaire

The age is materialistic. Verse isn't. I must be with the age, so I am writing prose. ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me. ~ Michel Faber

What did Saturday's used to taste like? Like eggs and fried ham and the bitter smell of hair in heavy rollers. Like long quiet hours and making up after a fight. Like ointment and bruising. Like waiting, especially, for something - anything - to happen. ~ Lauren Oliver

Mario Cuomo famously said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We also critique the government in poetry - angsty, adolescent poetry, but poetry nonetheless. The ~ Eliot Nelson

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom. ~ David Shields

everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.

but i have hope
because i do not know everything. ~ AVA.

But like all beautiful faces Emily's made you believe that its possessor was a better person than she was. It allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret, and for all her talent could no longer manage to string twenty-five paragraphs fo prose together to make a short story. ~ Michael Chabon

THE OWLS
by: Charles Baudelaire
UNDER the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.
Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.
From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;
For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919. ~ Charles Baudelaire

From the prose poem "The Universe Thrums on regardless" in my book SPAN.
We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that. ~ Jay Woodman

We never believe we're beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way. ~ Francine Prose

Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz ~ Kevin Ansbro

Vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt, ~ Francine Prose