Poetic Prose Quotes & Sayings

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

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

MORE CONSISTENTLY THAN EVER I WAS TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT CINEMA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ART HAS ITS OWN POSSIBILITIES WHICH ARE EQUAL TO THOSE OF PROSE. I WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW CINEMA IS ABLE TO OBSERVE LIFE, WITHOUT INTERFERING, CRUDELY OR OBVIOUSLY, WITH ITS CONTINUITY. FOR THAT IS WHERE I SEE THE POETIC ESSENCE OF CINEMA. — Andrei Tarkovsky

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

Ava knew the incidental betrayals of life. — Nicki Salcedo

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

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

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

Time held no meaning as my mind darted in and out of memories. Past and present collided to create a full-sensory collage out of my life: playing hide-n-seek with my best friends Luke - who always cheated by walking through walls when he was about to be caught - and Lucy; Mr. Caldrin critiquing my sketches and offering ideas to make them more realistic; targets changing faces, blending into the same person, their thoughts rippling through my mind like waves. Through it all, a demon stalked me from the shadows of my memories, never quite showing its face, but crouching, waiting.
And then I dreamed ... — Kimberly Kinrade

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

The dust of thirty years hung lifeless in shafts of morning light, the gilding of perfectly prim pages shone incanescent, the shriek of rolling ladders mourned in perennial soliloquy. — Michelle Franklin

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

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

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

She thought of Chacko's laugh, and a smile stayed in her eyes for a long time. — Arundhati Roy

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

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

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

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems. — Pattiann Rogers

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

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

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

It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters - a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real. — Marguerite Young

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

Paper is the strongest material in the world. Things under which a mountain will crumble, you can place on paper and it will hold: beauty at its most intense; love at its fiercest; the greatest grief; the greatest rage. — Nadeem Aslam

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

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

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

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

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

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. — Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running out of veins. — William S. Burroughs

Quiet was another kind of warning. — Nicki Salcedo

Below me, in spreading, concentric circles, like those a fish makes when it rises in still water, spun round the lower tiers; above me arched the black sky pierced by the gas jets of the stars. — Angela Carter

I have tried to tell him in a dozen different ways that I am only six inches tall. I've told him I am as tall as his heart, that he could hold all of me in his hand, that I am shorter than I appear. Every time, he's acted as though I'm saying something romantic or poetic. — Jennie Bates Bozic

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

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

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

The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic. — Robert Graves

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose. — Edward Hirsch

..Breaking yet budding,
dying yet living - standing
amongst ruins and rage,
reaching for possibilities
playing hard to get. — Meraaqi

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

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble. — John Crowe Ransom

purple threaded evening. a torn goddess laying on the roof. milk sky. lavender hued moan against hot asphalt. the thickness of evening presses into your throat. polaroids taped to the ceiling. ivy pouring out of the cracks in the wall. i found my courage buried beneath molding books and forgot to lock the door behind me. the old house never forgets. opened my mouth and a dandelion fell out. reached behind my wisdom teeth and found sopping wet seeds. pulled all of my teeth out just to say i could. he drowned himself in a pill bottle and the orange really brought out his demise. lay me down on a bed of ground spices. there's a song there, i know it. amethyst geode eyes. cracked open. no one saw it coming.
october never loved you.
the moon still doesn't understand that. — Taylor Rhodes

Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular. Behind it her teeth shone sharp and white as bone. — Madeline Miller

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

Why can't prose be poetic? — Kevin Focke

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

I suppose one starts out, as a child, being romantic and dreaming of adventure. Poetic. Then reality comes along, and with it, a whole lot of prose. — Roberta Pearce

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only in art was cheerful condemned. — Nicki Salcedo

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

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. — Milan Kundera

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

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

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs. — William Shakespeare

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

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

Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music! — Lori R. Lopez

And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn't here at all. Then you phoned. — Ali Smith

Drink from the ethereal philosophy of Heaven and you may see life as no more no less than a dream made of pure poetry from divine source. AA — Ana Claudia Antunes

Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose. — Pattiann Rogers

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

I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?

Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows. — Meraaqi

They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls. — Dan Simmons

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

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. — Ben Lerner

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip. — Eugenio Montale

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

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

I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified. — Neil Peart

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