Quotes about prose

A collection of quotes on the topic of prose, poetry, writing, likeness.

Quotes about prose

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

George Orwell Why I Write

Source: "Why I Write" http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/work/essays/write.html, Gangrel (Summer 1946) <br class="br">Context: Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.<br>It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness.

Love, Pleasure, Feeling

“Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

“Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 22
Context: Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Love, Passion

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“Prose is walking; poetry is flying”

Galway Kinnell (1927–2014) Poet

Flying

“To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Death, Nature, Reading

“No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Courage

“The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Lover's Gift

Books, Youth, Heart

“Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Life, People

“Socrates: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.
Phaedrus: Clearly.
Socrates: And what is well and what is badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?”

Plato book Phaedrus

258d (tr. Benjamin Jowett)
paraphrased in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig: "And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
Phaedrus

“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.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

"Letter to Mr. B — ".

Pleasure, Music, Idea

“[Mitchell wanted in her painting].. the feeling in a line of poetry which makes it different from, a line of prose... Sentimentality is self-pity, your own swamp. Weeping in your own beer is not a feeling. It lacks dignity and hasn't an outside reference.”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

Quote of Joan Mitchell from an interview with Irving Sandler (c. 1956); as cited in Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter, by Patricia Albers, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 3 may 2011, p. 244
1950 - 1975

Feeling, Beer, Painting

“Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 92
The Gay Science (1882)

“Your favourite virtue … Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man … Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman … Weakness
Your chief characteristic … Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness … To fight
Your idea of misery … Submission
The vice you excuse most … Gullibility
The vice you detest most … Servility
Your aversion … Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation … Book-worming
Favourite poet … Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer … Diderot
Favourite hero … Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine … Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower … Daphne
Favourite colour … Red
Favourite name … Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish … Fish
Favourite maxim … Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me, Terence]
Favourite motto … De omnibus dubitandum”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Everything must be doubted <br class="br"> Marx's replies to a set of questions given to him by his daughters Jenny and Laura in 1865 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/04/01.htm

Happiness, Books, Flowers, Idea

“Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

“I was completely ignorant of the poetry of Poe; it is admirable, it is poetry itself, the dream, and how one feels that you have translated its soul! I am no more than a completely illiterate ignoramus, but am not any the less moved by it. I knew only Poe's prose, which I had read and admired very young before I had heard it spoken of, but how your poems complete and express the man he was”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in his letter, 15 February 1889, (L. 911); as cited in Steven Z. Levine, ‎Claude Monet (1994), Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self. p. 93
1870 - 1890

Dreams, Feeling, Soul, Reading

“What good poetry and good prose have in common is vitality of rhythm.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

“There are some simple maxims […] which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"How I Write", The Writer, September 1954
1950s

Thinking

“Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.”

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer

As quoted in Life of John Stuart Mill (1954) by M. St.J. Packe, Bk. I, Ch. II

“The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Philosophy of Composition

The Philosophy of Composition (published 1846).

Truth, Passion, Heart

“Facts in Prose
When someone we love no longer desires us.
We become emotionally damaged.
Were consumed with torment every day.
Within long-term relationships the lack of desire is commonplace.
Women lose desire for their partner sooner than men.
When your partner avoids or rejects kissing, their love has passed.
Collect your pieces and move on.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1987

Love, Women, Men, Making love

“[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."

(Interview,, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Feeling, Winter, Speed

“Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets. I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla, she can have her Sammy in the desert, with his cheap short stories and stinking prose, but wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939)

God, Angels, Waiting

“I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

Source: My Family and Other Animals

“Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.”

Mina Loy (1882–1966) Futurist poet and actress

Source: The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy

Music, Idea

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16

“(…) the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.”

Andrei Makine (1957) French writer

“The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

People

“I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.”

Dorothy Dunnett (1923–2001) British writer

Source: The Game of Kings

God, People

“There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.”

Stephen King book Misery

Source: Misery

People, Guy, Hell, Understanding

“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

12 July 1827.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Variant: Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Context: I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”

Louis-ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) French writer

People, Music, Hell, Reality

“Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.”

Carol Shields Unless

Source: Unless

People, Thinking

“We are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human’s abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism. We strive to imagine (and show to the viewer) the reality of the 21st century - the life of future humans developing, solving their difficulties and problems but being already on the new levels of cognition and morality. But the foundation of that future is being laid now. We strive to represent the future people as vivid and free, in the unity of their joys and cares, poetry and prose of their life. We are in no way satisfied with the primitive and unconvincing image of "people of the future", which can be observed in some works of literature and cinema. At the same time, we consider our work to be polemical with the many books and movies produced by the bourgeois world, which tend to see the future in an apocalyptic or technocratic way, affirming a sort of disbelief in the strength and capabilities of a human being.”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director

Letter to the central committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) https://varjag2007su.livejournal.com/2591915.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social (20 October 1970).

Life, War, People, Books

“In the present day, however, the province of Rhetoric, in the widest acceptation that would reckoned admissible, comprehends all "Composition in Prose;" in the narrowest sense, it would be limited to "Persuasive Speaking."”

Richard Whately (1787–1863) English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian

Introduction, p. 4
Elements of Rhetoric (1828)

Sense

“French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", 1961

Nature

“The whole prospect of Gaelic appals me, the more I think of the difficulties and the likelihood of its extinction in a generation or two. A … language with … no modern prose of any account, no philosophical or technical vocabulary to speak of, no correct usage except among old people and a few university students, colloquially full of gross English idiom lately taken over, exact shades of meanings of most words not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialectally varying enormously (what chance of the appreciation of the overtones of poetry, except amongst a handful?) Above all, all economic, social and political factors working against it, and, with that, the notorious, moral cowardice of the Highlanders themselves.”

Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) Scottish poet

Sorley MacLean, June 1943, quoted in Krause, Corinna. "Translating Gaelic Scotland" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/beae/ab4c968782c1c0eeb7ee0f9459d009fab52d.pdf and "Gaelic Scotland – A Postcolonial Site?" https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41178_en.pdf <br class="br">Letters and interviews

People, Thinking, Universe, Chance

“The first work I published was a poem. That was one of my most exciting moments. Afterwards, I wrote many different types of articles, including prose, novels, and even science fiction. However, I found I wasn't very qualified, because I only had a four-year primary school education. So I turned to writing fairy tales.”

Zheng Yuanjie (1955) Chiese writer

Zheng Yuanjie (2008) in: "China's Hans Christian Andersen" on CRIENGLISH.com, June 19, 2008 ( online http://english.cri.cn/4406/2008/06/19/1141@370720.htm).

Education, School, Science

“If the English version is in what, in our youth, we used to speak of affectionately as dear old iambic pentameter, the actors mercifully abstain from reciting it that way; they speak their lines as good, hardy prose. p. 76”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 2: 1919

Youth, Way

“Hebrew poetry is,
prose with a sort of heightened consciousness' Ecstasy
affords
the occasion expediency, determines the form”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

The Past is the Present
Collected Poems (1951)

“Let us look to beautiful poetry for the material of a beautiful prose.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Beauty

“Good authors, too, who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose —
Anything goes.”

Cole Porter (1891–1964) American composer and songwriter

"Anything Goes"
Anything Goes (1934)

“There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on;
Whose prose is grand verse while his verse the Lord knows
Is some of it pr— No, 't is not even prose!”

James Russell Lowell A Fable for Critics

Pt. I - Emerson, st. 1
A Fable for Critics (1848)

“The difference between poetry and prose is not one of surface qualities, or form, or mode of expression, but of essence. The state of mind in which poetry originates must either seek poetic expression or it must not be expressed.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

“There is something in Poetry beyond Prose-reason; there are Mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) p. 28.

“I enjoy French poetry as well as French prose, and I believe that this land must have some cultural connection with the European continent, and that she is best connected through her spiritual complement across the Straits of Dover.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

"Some Books: A New Year's Resolution for 1944" (1943), reprinted in Jeffrey M. Heath, (ed.) The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E.M. Forster, Dundurn, 2008.

“Now verse is more valuable than prose … for the simple reasons that its rhythms are faster and more highly organized than are those of prose, and so lend themselves to a greater complexity and compression of relationship, and that the intensity of this convention renders possible a greater intensity of other desirable conventions, such as poetic language and devices of rhetoric.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Morality of Poetry
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

“It was a brilliant, mutinous period. Brecht gave back to German prose its Lutheran simplicity and Thomas Mann brought into his style the supple, luminous elegance of the classic and Mediterranean tradition. These years, 1920-33, were the anni mirabiles of the modern German spirit.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Hollow Miracle" (1959).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“The fact that you can write verse is in itself a certificate that you can write prose.”

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) American poet

What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)

“For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

Accepting National Medal for Literature (April 27, 1982).

Youth, Beauty, Universe

“Whether we are writing prose or verse we must never use language in a merely decorative way, every qualifying word, every adjective and adverb must be carefully inspected & weighed before it is used and ask before its use, is it really necessary.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Way

“I began … to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.”

George Eliot book Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Part 1
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

Pain

“Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Detail & Prosody for the Poem Patterson given to James Laughlin (1939), now at Houghton Library
General sources

“Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275

“Making drawings to indicate the many elements in any human situation is something which has characterized SSM from the start. Its rationale lies in the fact that the complexity of human affairs is always a complexity of multiple interacting relationships; and pictures are a better medium than linear prose for expressing relationships. Pictures can be taken in as a whole and help to encourage holistic rather than reductionist thinking about a situation.”

Peter Checkland (1930) British management scientist

Source: Systems thinking, systems practice: includes a 30-year retrospective, 1999, p. 16

Thinking, Help, Drawing

“He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words… he branded them like cattle he rustled out there on the free ranges of Literature… Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs vocabulary could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you'd say, 'Why, that's a Burroughs.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

On the prose of William S. Burroughs in Here to Go: Planet R-101 (Interviews with Terry Wilson),Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 159.

Literature

“I see in painters prose writers and poets. Rhyme, measure, and the turning of verses, which is indispensable and which gives them so much vigor, are analogous to the hidden symmetry, to the equilibrium at once wise and inspired, which governs the meeting or separation of lines and spaces, the echoes of color, etc….. but the beauty of verse does not consist of exactitude in obeying rules... It resides in a thousand secret harmonies and conventions which make up the power of poetry and which go straight to the imagination; in just the same way the happy choice of forms and the right understanding of their relationship act on the imagination in the art of painting.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 19 September 1847; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 229
1831 - 1863

Happiness, Secret, Beauty, Art

“It has been said Mr. President, that while we can only read the prose in the laws we pass, he sees numbers in them, and imagine them in digits.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2013, Speech: Nomination of Senator Ralph Recto as Senate Pro Tempore

Law, Imagination, Reading

“The social sciences are in a special difficulty because they cover the same field of human behavior as literature. As science, they must claim to improve upon the prejudice and superstition of common sense, and are therefore compelled to restate the language of common sense, full of implication and innuendo, in irreproachable, blameless, scientific prose innocent of bias or any other subtlety.”

Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Behavior, Literature, Sense, Science

“As there are so many who talk prose without knowing it, or, again, who syllogize without having the least idea what a syllogism is, so economists have long been mathematicians without being aware of the fact.”

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy

William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (1871). Preface To The Second Edition, p. 14.
The Theory of Political Economy (1871)

Idea

“They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether an aspect of Jane Robert's unconscious mind or a genuine "spirit," was of a high level of intelligence. Yet when Jane Roberts produced a book that purported to be the after-death journal of the philosopher William James, it was difficult to take it seriously. James's works are noted for their vigour and clarity of style; Jane Robert's "communicator" writes like an undergraduate... there is a clumsiness here that is quite unlike James's swift-moving, colloquial prose.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000), p. 390

Death, Books, Intelligence, Communication

“I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people… that shadow land between self and reality.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Paris Review Interview (1998)

People, World, Thinking, Reality

“Beautifully written… the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven… contains writing of which our best writers would be proud… there is not a singly ugly or dead sentence…' - or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences - unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as 'Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler' or 'Eric Pickford answered' or 'Pazzi worked like a man possessed' or 'Margot laughed in spite of herself' or 'Bob Sneed broke the silence.' What these commentators must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us to a dying fall: 'Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself…' 'It seemed forever ago…' 'He looked deep, deep into her eyes…' 'His dark eyes held her whole…' Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of Hannibal by Thomas Harris, p. 240
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Life, Feeling, Thinking, Silence

“But the temptation to wallow and disport myself in the purple prose of the doting collector is strong, and it will need all my vigilance to resist it.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Strong

“Free verse may be written as very beautiful prose; prose may be written as very beautiful free verse. Which is which?”

John Livingston Lowes (1867–1945) American academic

Nation (February 1916)

Beauty

“Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

“Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Luna De Enfrente

"A Poem by Oscar Wilde" http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_wilde.html (1925) An essay on Wilde and his Ballad of Reading Gaol.

“Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression. … by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking. … There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

English Prose Style (1928)
Literary Quotes

Thinking, Time

“Langlands' life has been by no means as extravagant as Grothendieck's, but his romanticism is evident to anyone who reads his prose; the audacity of his program, one of the most elaborate syntheses of conjectures and theorems ever undertaken, has few equivalents in any field of scholarship.”

Michael Harris (1954) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, 2015, p. 26

Life, Reading

“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement… says heaven and earth in one word… speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.”

Christopher Fry (1907–2005) British writer

Time, New York, April 3, 1950

Time

“The prose writer drags meaning along with a rope, the poet makes it stand out and hit you.”

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

Speculations (Essays, 1924)

“Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 154

“Unlike philosophy, art does not search for islands of security from which other experiences can be expelled as fantastic or imaginary, or rejected as a world of secondary qualities or enjoyment, of pleasure or common sense. Art radicalizes the difference between the real and the merely possible in order to show through works of its own that even in the realm of possibility there is order after all. Art opposes, to use a Hegelian formulation, “the prose of the world,” but for precisely this reason it needs this contrast.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Source: Art As a Social System (2000), p. 146 as cited in: Astonishment And Recognition http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/astonishment-and-recognition/ on unrealnature.wordpress.com, January 26, 2012.

Pleasure, World, Art, Search

“She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don’t expect attractive men to have attractive souls.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Men, Soul, Passion

“He wrote down everything he saw and heard, and most of his thoghts, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. It could take him many hours to write in his diary a survey of one full day: everything was an experience, any noteworthy observation which some nameless person might make was a new vista, any insignificant piece of information was a new sunrise, any ordinary poem he read for the first time was the beginning of a new epoch like a flight around the globe; the world was multiform, magnificent and opulent, and he loved it.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love, World, Time, Reading

“I've made my best notes sitting outside cafes on busy streets, or in murky bars in foreign cities. I sorted out a big series of problems in the novel I'm just finishing while sitting drinking a long line of solitary beers in a bar in a small coastal town. The hangover was pretty brutal, but I'm not sure I'd have found the solutions any other way. Part of the job of being a writer is learning how your head works - when to push it, when to step back. This kind of self-management is actually far harder, I think, than learning how to write decent prose.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Way, Drink, Beer, Business

“Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to A.N. Pleshcheev (January 15, 1889)
Letters

“Well, I think it is accidental. It’s just something I started doing naturally and it had a lot to do with reading. I think that Dylan Thomas, his prose and poetry, was a big influence on me. Just his use of words… He would use so many odd words: like these three- and four-syllable words that you just don’t normally hear. And they’re not used in a manner that sets the text apart from the reader. Rather they’re drawing the reader in. It’s entirely based on the alliteration of the word itself—onomatopoeia and things like that. I feel like a lot of the words I use don’t stick out in the song because they keep the feel of the song in mind. The rhythm—that’s the primary thing. They’re put in there for rhythm and alliteration as much as they are for meaning. And as long as they are not used extraneously, they’re real lightning rods for people listening to the lyrics. If the words are really helping out the rhythm of the song then all they’re going to do is draw the listener in even more”

Colin Meloy (1974) American musician

On his songwriting technique. Interview with Colin Meloy, 2004-06 http://www.believermag.com/issues/200406/?read=interview_meloy,

People, Feeling, Nature, Thinking

“Even in prose, the greatest writers have not often succeeded in stating simply and clearly the fact that Infinity can make itself finite or that Space can make itself bounds or that Eternity can generate time. In verse, Adam did it as easily as though he were writing any other miracle.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Time

“Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Introduction
The Wedge (1944)

Perfection

“What is wonderful about a university like LSE is that you not only receive teaching of very high quality, you also learn where to find the knowledge you are seeking. And you make unexpected discoveries; it was a Marxist professor who introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman, a great master of English prose as well as theology.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 1, 1919 - 1968 The Road to 24 Sussex Drive, p. 46
Memoirs (1993)

Knowledge, Learning, Universe

“From the start, the prose in my Hank books copied the storytelling techniques of ranchers and cowboys, which means it was heavily influenced by an oral tradition. It was a natural and easy step to move from reading my stories aloud to audiences in Perryton, to recording them in a studio in Amarillo. The Hank audios have the feel of the radio programs I listened to in the fifties: character voices, background music, and sound effects.”

John R. Erickson (1942) American author

John R. Erickson on the discipline of writing, the world of publishing, and (of course) dogs http://www.lonestarliterary.com/john-r.-erickson-061415.html (June 14, 2015)

Books, Music, Feeling, Nature

“The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.”

Stanley Fish (1938) American academic

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 6, The Additive Style, p. 62

Success

“I just wanted to say something about (…) my resentment of the identification of this country of Britain with royalty. As if we have nothing else to offer as a culture – the country of my birth. The great contribution, of the English anyway, to the world is literature and language. That language and literature is, in fact, in its tradition quite extensively republican and democratic. I mean our Blake, Milton, our Shelley, many many other great writers, poetry and prose, have been against the idea that Britain is a feudal or monarchic system. One of the great aspects of that tradition is represented by the name Thomas Paine, who is the moral author of your Declaration of Independence. In fact, one of the great accomplishments of the English republican movement, if you like, is the American Declaration of Independence. So it has always struck me as rather bizarre that there is this cult in the United States of English royalism – just the sort of thing I left England to get away from.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1997-05-09
Christopher Hitchens on Diana, Princess of Wales, the Royal Family, Dodi Fayed & Muslim Law (1997)
C-SPAN
Washington, D.C.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQK2d1TdTzk
1990s

Pain, World, Literature, Idea

“All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

Tout ce qui n'est point prose, est vers; et tout ce qui n'est point vers, est prose.
Act II, sc. iv
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670)

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Life, Fate, Pleasure, Truth

“When you review an exhibition of paintings you don't compose a painting about it, when you review a film you don't make a film about it and when you review a new CD you don't make a little CD about it. But when you review a prose-narrative then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative and those who write the secondary prose-narrative, let's face it, must have once had dreams of writing the primary prose-narrative. And so there is a kind of hierarchy of envy and all those other things.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National (4 September 1999) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s21638.htm

Dreams, Envy, Painting

“Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en susse rien.
Act II, sc. iv
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670)

“Millions of people in Britain must have been very surprised to hear that the language of Chaucer, of Shakespeare and of Milton must in future be regarded as an undesirable American import from which we have to protect ourselves if we are to build a new Europe. We can agree that the French own the supreme prose literature in Europe. But if we are to prove –– if we have to prove –– our Europeanism by accepting that French is the dominant language in the Community, then my answer is quite clear, and I will say it in French in order to prevent any misunderstanding: Non, merci beaucoup.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech at Southampton (25 May 1971)
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer

People, Communication, Literature, Future

“Paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of a great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Waiting on God (1950), Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God

Problem, Effort, Affliction, Help

“If people need a book to tell them that in marriage kindness and forbearance are necessary, and that the sexual act is happier when it is undertaken to give pleasure as well as to receive it, these books are what they want. Possibly people so lacking in understanding of themselves and others do not mind being addressed in the coarse, grainy prose of the marriage counselor.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Marriage, People, Pleasure, Books

“It is part of the task of linguistics to describe texts, and all texts, including those prose or verse, which fall within any definition of literature and are accessible to analysis by the existing methods of linguistics.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1950s–1960s, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, 1964, p. 1.

Literature, Parting

“Man axalotl here below but I ask very little. Some fragments of Pamphylides, a Choctaw blood-mask, the prose of Scaliger the Elder, a painting by Fuseli, an occasional visit to the all-in wrestling, or to my meretrix; a cook who can produce a passable 'poulet à la Khmer,' a Pong vase. Simple tastes, you will agree, and it is my simple habit to indulge them!”

Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) British author

"Told in Gath"
The Condemned Playground (1945)

Painting, Cooking

“Luther's Qualifications. Luther had a rare combination of gifts for a Bible translator: familiarity with the original languages, perfect mastery over the vernacular, faith in the revealed word of God, enthusiasm for the gospel, unction of the Holy Spirit. A good translation must be both true and free, faithful and idiomatic, so as to read like an original work. This is the case with Luther's version. Besides, he had already acquired such fame and authority that his version at once commanded universal attention.
His knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was only moderate, but sufficient to enable him to form an independent judgment. What he lacked in scholarship was supplied by his intuitive genius and the help of Melanchthon. In the German tongue he had no rival. He created, as it were, or gave shape and form to the modern High German. He combined the official language of the government with that of the common people. He listened, as he says, to the speech of the mother at home, the children in the street, the men and women in the market, the butcher and various tradesmen in their shops, and, "looked them on the mouth," in pursuit of the most intelligible terms. His genius for poetry and music enabled him to reproduce the rhythm and melody, the parallelism and symmetry, of Hebrew poetry and prose. His crowning qualification was his intuitive insight and spiritual sympathy with the contents of the Bible.
A good translation, he says, requires "a truly devout, faithful, diligent, Christian, learned, experienced, and practiced heart."”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's competence as a Bible translator

Women, Men, God, Children

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

John Wain (1925–1994) British writer

Talk on BBC Radio, 13 January 1976
Quoted in "The Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Quotations", J M & M J Cohen (1996) p. 389 ISBN 0-14-051165-2

Dance