Poetic Prose Quotes

Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive. ~ Bailey Cunningham

Ava knew the incidental betrayals of life. ~ Nicki Salcedo

In such a dreamy mood one may find one may well wound one's feet against sharp stones, forget to doff one's hat to distinguished persons, bid one's friends good morning in the middle of the night, and dash one's head against the first front door one comes to, because one had forgot to open it; in short, the spirit wears one's body like an ill-fitting garment that is everywhere too wide, too long, too uncomfortable. ~ E.T.A. Hoffmann

APPLES SCENT,
You arrive in the basement. Immediatly it catches you. Apples are here, lying on fruit trays, turned crates. You didn't think about it. You had no wish to be flooded by this melancholic wave. But you can't resist. Apple scent is a breaker. How could you manage without this childhood, bitter and sweet ?
Shrivelled fruits surely are delicious, from this feak dryness where candied taste seems to have wormed in each wrinkle. But you don't wish to eat them. Particularly don't turn into an identifiable taste this floating power of smell. Say that it smells good, strong? But not ..... It's beyond .... An inner scent, scent of a better oneself. Here is shut up school autumn, with purple ink we scratch paper with down strokes and thin strokes. Rain bangs against glasses, evening will be long ....
But apple perfume is more than past. You think about formerly because of fullness and intensity from a remembrance of salpetered cellar, dark attic. But it's to live here, stay here, stand up.
You have behind you high herbs and damp orchards. Ahead it's like a warm blow given in the shade. Scent got all browns, all reds with a bit of green acid. Scent distilled skin softness, its tiny roughness. Lips dried, we alreadyt know that this thirst is not to be slaked.
Nothing would happen if you bite the white flesh. You would need to become october, mud floor, moss of cellar, rain, expectation.
Apple scent is painful. It's from a stronger life, a slowness ~ Philippe Delerm

The hope in her voice now made me think of a flower growing in shadow. ~ Gene Wolfe

Wherever she sought solitude, she was never alone. Suddenly that wasn't a bad thing. There was safety in numbers greater than one and sanity in knowing that everyone healed. If everyone has scars, there are two choices. Bleed to death slowly or stitch yourself together. ~ Nicki Salcedo

From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life. ~ Bao Shu

She knew that the dead hid pieces of themselves in the world. They buried organs in the living. They stuffed memories into trees and clouds and other innocuous things. ~ Lauren DeStefano

She could not think of what had happened to her that day, or of what might happen that night. Instead, she watched the lamplighters move along the avenues even as their celestial counterparts set the stars alight in the sky. The rain had washed the city clean, and the air was a confection of clematis and violets and peony. Music and light spilled out of so many grand houses that the two seemed at once ubiquitous and united, as if to play a note was to send forth a ray of illumination, and a quartet was enough to set the grandest halls aglitter. ~ Galen Beckett

Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only a species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not ... not the way his face said he felt. ~ Stephen King

Felix had left his heart buried in the ground years ago, but he felt it crack apart. ~ Lauren DeStefano

He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he'd learned, but there were different types of gray, some darker than others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn't brave enough to enter. ~ Lauren DeStefano

hough we travel the whole over to find the perfect match,we must carry it with us a light or it's playing hard to catch. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness. ~ Charles Baudelaire

As she walked, clock towers across Prague started arguing midnight, and the long, fraught Monday came at last to a close. ~ Laini Taylor

And the Light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not
John 1:5
And the Light shineth in darkness; and she comprehended it not
Her 7:2013
The Light still shines in darkness; and she did not know this
She 6:2014
His Light continue to shine in the darkness; and she did not recognize him
We 5:2015 ~ Gregory C. Warner

The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again. ~ Lauren DeStefano

She was a drawing that hadn't been colored. ~ Lauren DeStefano

He might be worried, but at least he's not upset with me. My family gets up set easily, and he got stuck helping me out. Wrong place. Wrong time.
She tried to turn her face to hide marks.
The nurse told her no.
Everything is right. Right place. Right time for both of you.
Are you from Jamaica? Ava asked, but she knew the answer. The woman had that terrible peace about her that some people were born with. There was no wrong. Everything could be made right. ~ Nicki Salcedo

We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar. ~ Heather O'Neill

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry. ~ Story Musgrave

If everyone could be brought low, then everyone could rise up. ~ Nicki Salcedo

I could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream. ~ Azar Nafisi

I should have bailed. That little voice had my back. That little voice is older than I am. It's older than the oldest person who ever lived. I should have listened to that voice. ~ Rick Yancey

I think the sun where he were born drew all such humours from him. - 3.4.26 ~ William Shakespeare

Yuvali struggled to put one foot in front of the other. The long leaves of a purple-flowered bush raked her forehead. The flower emerged from bulbous green tubes, unfolding toward the sun. The petals radiated like flecks in an eye, a whirlpool, a sea-shell." Ch.19 ~ B.T. Lowry

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars. ~ Raymond Chandler

Quiet was another kind of warning. ~ Nicki Salcedo

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

All Art is a gift of the Holy Spirit. When this light shines through the mind of a musician, it manifests itself in beautiful harmonies. Again, shining through the mind of a poet, it is seen in fine poetry and poetic prose. When the Light of the Sun of Truth inspires the mind of a painter, he produces marvellous pictures. These gifts are fulfilling their highest purpose, when showing forth the praise of God. ~ Abdu'l- Baha

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words. ~ Ann Zwinger

We are all made of glass. Snow floats around us. We are delicately made, meant to be smashed. ~ Nicki Salcedo

In a world muddled with madness, I made a conscious effort to stay sane. ~ Angela Colleen Prendergast

She wished that when her heart was beating double, she could give one of those hearts to him and then press her ear to his chest and feel it beating. ~ Lauren DeStefano

He followed it down, in full flight now, the trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them. ~ Cormac McCarthy

There's April in her hair. Motion and stillness. Wings and earth. There are tears, and there is ... friendship. There is velvet, and traveling, and distance, bones and blood, summer coming again as it always does, love. ~ Laura Kasischke

Pram wasn't told the story of her birth. But even as a very small girl, she felt deep in her chest that she was alive and dead at the same time. ~ Lauren DeStefano

They are paper cutouts rather than people, Pram thought. They are shadows with black dots for eyes and grim lines for mouths. They almost resemble the dead, but not quite. ~ Lauren DeStefano

The street is still shut as we step into the molten-gold atmosphere of mid-afternoon. The houses face each other across the passages like armies of an ancient Arabian battlefield ... .We narrow our eyes against the glare. Beating their wings, the birds too are leaving the trees for the mosque. The leaves hang like limp hands from the branches. We try to think of the cool blue river and, turning around, glance towards where the river wets the horizon. But the river, too, seems helpless before the insanity of the sun, lying like an exhausted lizard at the end of the street ~ Nadeem Aslam

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something. ~ William Faulkner

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

The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions. ~ Ann Zwinger

It was shivery and scant. Scared. Skint. But just around the edges it was still scintillant. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Driving down deserted early morning roads. Round and round. Round downtown. Through naked streets. Lips pursed on two litre bottles of beer, but pursuing the lips of freedom's night. Swapping cars. Winding up at karaoke bars or Bolsi- the best place in town. For the food. For the folk. For the service. For the crema de papaya. And for that late night dawn's whiskey coffee. ~ Harry Whitewolf

Was that - did she just grin at me? To me? A moment of stillness in this moment of pause. Without speaking, we let our gazes wander slow, groping to confirm relief in the other. There's a subdued excitement for the oncoming sharing of whatever's waiting for us behind that heavy iron door, exclusive - two solitary embers, isolated in their separate pits, far away but fanned by the same wind, the same night, alone with the night, their respective camps all gone to sleep, flaring softly cradled calling, out against the great dark backdrop of the great unknown. ~ Patrick Bryant

Stone gnomes and angels filled the gardens, and it seemed that they were also sleeping, as though a witch had cast a spell on them. ~ Lauren DeStefano

Like blood out of a wound, a keening wail rose from the bottom of my heart and ripped through the graveyard. I lowered my face to Hadassah's shoulder and went quietly and thoroughly to pieces. ~ Angela Elwell Hunt

They're talking as if nothing's happened, Soledad said to herself, and the jealousy ran from her ears into her heart, where it settled into her aorta and reshaped itself as longing and desire, the kind of want that makes one capable of poor but magnanimous decisions. ~ Derek Palacio

A single shoe. Only someone under a spell would lose a shoe and not turn back for it. ~ Nicki Salcedo

It is easy to pride yourself on brains when you had both brains and beauty. Beauty was fleeting, and here was the proof. It was gone. ~ Nicki Salcedo

The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words ... There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which reosund about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning ... That is not all: we are living in an age of mystifications. Some are fundamental ones which are due to the structure of society; some are secondary. At any rate, the social order today rests upon the mystification of consciousness, as does disorder as well. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux. ~ Franz Wright

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. ~ Steve Jobs

Michael Bohn provides a rare opportunity to experience the American sporting scene in the Roaring Twenties. A constant stream of legendary characters marches across these pages. You'll meet them all: The Babe, The Four Horsemen, The Manassa Manassas Mauler, The Wheaton Iceman, Bill Tilden, Gertrude Ederle, and Grantland Rice, the sportswriter whose purple prose made them all come alive. ~ Peter Golenbock

I might have some sort of personality disorder. I might not have proper filters; it might be some kind of version of Asperger's meets Tourettes meets prose. ~ Jonathan Ames

Eric Peters' music is at the top of what gets played around my house, in my car and while I am running. I am a big fan. He writes incredibly honest and poetic lyrics coupled with memorable pop melodies and I can think of no better combination. ~ Jill Phillips

From the fourteenth to the nineteenth century we have merely been expending the incalculable treasures discovered then and using up the great supply of energies gathered up to that time. Hence, modern history is the antithesis of the Middle Ages; man no longer wants to keep silent about himself: he hastens to express to others every slightest feeling and every new thought he may have through the medium of colors or sounds and, without fail, by means of the printing press. One might say that just as man studiously effaced himself up to the fourteenth century, so he becomes garrulous once he crosses into that century and all the succeeding ones. Not only what is wise, not only what is noble, but also what is ridiculous, stupid, and hideous in himself he couches in poetry and prose, sets to music, and would very much like, but he is unable, to express in marble and to fix within architectural lines. It is remarkable that architecture - that kind of impersonal art, that form of creation in which the creator is merged with his epoch and people, in which he does not rise above them, nor set apart his own I on their background - declines, as soon as we enter modern history, and not once during this period does it rise to the sublime or the beautiful.

("On Symbolists And Decadents") ~ Vasily Rozanov

In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification ("The Ideas"), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning - he called it "a poison, and an enemy of the people. ~ Marshall McLuhan

All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind. ~ Robert Kennedy

The Oriental approach to violence is a much more aesthetic and poetic approach, whereas in the western world, violence is put in because you can't solve the problem. Violence is always the last solution, but unfortunately, in cinema, it's the first solution, because it's easy. And it's often too easy. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn

His young man's limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater. ~ Stella Gibbons

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

I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem. ~ Pattiann Rogers

I am drawn allways toward you,
Your delicate and distant light,
Face which I have never seen. ~ Sean Russell

Everything that is ended, everything that is last, naturally awakens in man a feeling of sorrow and melancholy. At the same time, it excites a pleasurable feeling, pleasurable in that very sorrow, and that is because of the infiniteness of the idea that is contained in the words ended, last, etc. ( Thus by their nature such words are, and always will be, poetic, however ordinary and common they are, in whatever language and style.) ~ Giacomo Leopardi

No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

I write the word solitude on my wall and then below it: Do you know me at all? Are my words just air? Is my heart easy to spare? ~ Jessica Sorensen

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism. ~ W. H. Auden

I'd be happy to give special treatment to a dedicated school teacher, or even someone like William Faulkner if he was still alive, because despite the fact that an exegesis of his prose completely eluded me, I had to admit, especially when Jacob held me down and made me say it, that the guy was a kick-ass architect of the ever-elusive sentence. ~ Tiffanie DeBartolo

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. ~ Francine Prose

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why. ~ Jack Kerouac

The poetic image exists apart from causality. ~ Gaston Bachelard

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. ~ Joanne Greenberg

Git'er Done
They beat their swords upon their shields
To no beast or man would they yield ~ Muse

...citizens of the U.S. live under an Empire of "evil doers" who have set themselves juxtaposed to humanity instilling in us from our youngest days how to slay our human element in exchange for an external existence of malnourished pride. ~ Steven Storm

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

The difference between superlative pie and a wish for cake is crust. Understand that pie is a generous but self-centered substance. It likes attention, not affection. Do not hug your crust. Do not rub its back or five its high. Don't fuss with refrigerators every step oft he way. Keep the water and butter cold, and remember what a wise baker once said: The goal is pie. ~ Kate Lebo

The only solace was that Wepke seemed to appreciate how fine a piano he was about to receive and that he could also play it beautifully. It was the poetic way to look at the injustice, to see that at least the piano would be enjoyed and put to beautiful use. ~ Krystyna Chiger

let your love cover me like skin.
i want the whole world to see. ~ AVA.

She stands in the doorway to our room, blue sundress rumpled, the rosy light of sunset slanting through the wide widows and illuminating the gold of her hair. I'm struck speechless, my breath cutting short. I am not a poetic man, but I want to be one now. I want to do justice to her beauty and the way she fills me with a strange mixture of utter peace and demanding need. ~ Kristen Callihan

Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose. ~ John Dufresne

They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name. ~ Michel De Certeau

Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges's pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa

Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,
trying to say-
for the thousandth time-
what's easier done than said. ~ Piet Hein

Smokers always waxed poetic about the ritual of it, how a large part of the satisfaction was packing the box and pulling the foil wrapper and plucking an aromatic stick. They claimed they loved the lighting, the ashing, the feeling of being able to hold something between their fingers. That was all well and good, but there was nothing quite like actually smoking it: Leigh loved inhaling. To pull with your lips on that filter and feel the smoke drift across your tongue, down your throat, and directly into your lungs was to be transported momentarily to nirvana. She remembered- every day- how it felt after the first inhale, just as the nicotine was hitting her bloodstream. A few seconds of both tranquility and alertness, together, in exactly the right amounts. Then the slow exhale- forceful enough so that the smoke didn't merely seep from your mouth but not so energetic that it disrupted the moment- would complete the blissful experience. ~ Lauren Weisberger

Black is not sad ... Black is poetic. ~ Ann Demeulemeester

I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form. ~ Denise Mina

my mother thinks i'm a living proof of cultural appropriation
but aren't i a foreigner in my own country
an outsider
but only on the inside ~ Xayaat Muhummed

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be - the greater its emotional power and poetic reality ... ~ Pierre Reverdy

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. ~ Edgar Allan Poe