Prose And Poetry Quotes

Carrefour"

O You,
Who came upon me once
Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing,
Why did you not strangle me before speaking
Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words
And then leave me to the mercy
Of the forest bees.

Originally published in Coterie: A Quarterly: Art, Prose, and Poetry No. 4. Edited by Lall Chaman (1920) ~ Amy Lowell

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English. ~ Victor Hugo

I like the way the prose and poetry interact. ~ Rachel Zucker

We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation. ~ Ernst Haas

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink. ~ Franz Grillparzer

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language. ~ Pattiann Rogers

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer. ~ Joseph Brodsky

We will remain unwritten through history, no X will mark us on the map; but in books of prose and poetry, you loved me once, in a paragraph. ~ Lang Leav

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. ~ Virginia Woolf

I hope my dreams will reach the stars and that the universe answers them with tomorrow. ~ Giovannie De Sadeleer

The sweetness of dogs (fifteen)
What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. Full tonight.
So we go
and the moon rises, so beautiful it
makes me shudder, makes me think about
time and space, makes me take
measure of myself: one iota
pondering heaven. Thus we sit,
I thinking how grateful I am for the moon's
perfect beauty and also, oh! How rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up into
my face. As though I were
his perfect moon. ~ Mary Oliver

Poetry! Indeed, verses are the only thing that your letter lacks, Makar Alexievitch. And what tender feelings I can read in it - what roseate-coloured fancies! To the curtain, however, I had never given a thought. The fact is that when I moved the flower-pots, it LOOPED ITSELF up. There now! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

For me, poetry has no point in existing if it's not to be a prompt or aid to political and ethical change. ~ John Kinsella

For those who sense and comprehend,
They know that heaven is at hand;
The river blue which stream and stream,
It has the pictures of my dream. ~ Stephan Attia

The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry ~ Jacob Bronowski

We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood
between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

There's a great freedom of forms and intonations in Luigi Fontanella's poetry. He doesn't take a strong formal stand; his poetry entertains moments of nearly proselike colloquial narrative along with moments of powerful lyrical tension. There is a movement of extremes, from powerful tonality to near atonality, and I like this a great deal; it's a stance that very effectively catches the spirit that makes work in poetry possible nowadays. ~ Giovanni Raboni

Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness.

(essay : Hölderlin And The Essence Of Poetry, chapter from my copy of The origin of the work of art) ~ Martin Heidegger

love does not look like a person
love is our actions
love is giving all we can
even if it's just the bigger slice of cake
love is understanding
we have the power to hurt one another
but we are going to do everything in our power to make sure we don't
love is fighting out all the kind sweetness we deserve
and when someone shows up
saying they will provide it as you do
but their actions seem to break you
rather than build you
love is knowing whom to choose ~ Rupi Kaur

Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving ~ Mary Oliver

Ce fut le temps sous de clairs ciels,
(Vous en souvenez-vous, Madame?)
De baisers superficiels
Et des sentiments à fleur d'âme.

It was a time of cloudless skies,
(My lady, do you recall?)
Of kisses that brushed the surface
And feelings that shook the soul. ~ Paul Verlaine

Why do we smile? Why do we laugh? Why do we feel alone? Why are we sad and confused? Why do we read poetry? Why do we cry when we see a painting? Why is there a riot in the heart when we love? Why do we feel shame? What is that thing in the pit of your stomach called desire? ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

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

Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescrib'd, their present state;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer Being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n,
That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n;
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall. ~ Alexander Pope

Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are on to something deep. You see only deep brown wavy hair and strong legs, well honed by years of Ultimate Frisbee. You see that book of T. S. Eliot poems held by the hand with the long, graceful fingers, and you never stop to think that it shouldn't take half a semester to read one book of poems ... that maybe he is not so much reading as getting really high every morning and sleeping it off on the library steps, forcing the people who actually go to class to step or trip over him. ~ Maureen Johnson

They went forth to battle, but they always fell;
Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields;
Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well,
And sank heart-wounded by a subtle spell.
They knew not fear that to the foeman yields,
They were not weak, as one who vainly wields
A futile weapon; yet the sad scrolls tell
How on the hard-fought field they always fell.
It was a secret music that they heard,
A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace;
And that which pierced the heart was but a word,
Though the white breast was red-lipped where the sword
Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease
On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase.
Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were stirred,
And died for hearing what no foeman heard. ~ Shaemus O'Sheel

I have never been able to make out," I began, "why women are so shy about being caught reading poetry.
We men--lawyers, mechanics, or what not--may well feel ashamed. If we must read poetry, it should be at dead of night, within closed doors. But you women are so akin to poesy. The Creator Himself is a lyric poet, and Jayadeva must have practised the divine art seated at His feet. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

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

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject ... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause. ~ Washington Allston

Falling in love with you was out of my control, but I do have a say in what happens next. And, I will choose to stay in love with you through everything this life throws at us. ~ Liz Newman

I'm coming from journalism, but at the same time I'm tempted by poetry, politics, and maybe the idea of being a witness, a belief that you can still change things with the image. ~ Raymond Depardon

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry
if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again. ~ Jonah Lehrer

You were like the clouds
That made it difficult
For the stars in me to shine
And
To shine again
I had to let you go ~ Ambica Uppal

I came to you tardy and late
as I usually do to the better things in my life ~ Christy Brown

Poetry may appear to be just words, but it is an extension of our lives. It is the music of life and for us to f ind true happiness, we have to immerse ourselves in its beauty. ~ Abdul Milazi

Poetry is a kind of magic that very few can create and even fewer can truly understand and appreciate in all its glory. ~ Dennis Gabor

We aim to be
men who'll make
our mothers proud,
but we end up
making them cry,
and are only
slightly better
than our fathers,
at best ~ Phil Volatile