Purple Prose Quotes & Sayings

One tragic example of this orientation is the rampant prescription of painkillers, which now kill more people each year in the United States than guns or car accidents. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. — Malcolm Gladwell

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

Groves of orange and lemon perfumed the air, their ripe fruit glowing among the foliage; while, sloping to the plains, extensive vineyards spread their treasures. Beyond these, woods and pastures, and mingled towns and hamlets stretched towards the sea, on whose bright surface gleamed many a distant sail; while, over the whole scene was diffused the purple glow of evening. — Ann Radcliffe

So many large words, as though syllables will hide the truth. — Sharon Mock

We are using resources as if we had two planets, not one. There can be no 'plan B' because there is no 'planet B.' — Ban Ki-moon

The young think about how they'll change the world, the old think about how the world has changed. — Mardy Grothe

Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations. — Ellen Datlow

I read an article in a women's magazine about "writing purple prose for love and money." They made it sound easy, so I started writing on an old electronic typewriter that alternated between stuck keys and high throttle. I had no clue my first letter to Harlequin came back marked "Return to Sender." Luckily, I made my first sale before I understood how long the odds were. — Carrie Alexander

I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that. — H. G. Bissinger

The river - with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o'er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs' white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory - is a golden fairy stream. — Jerome K. Jerome

My interest in words and literature is always changing. And every day of work is different, and it doesn't feel laborious in the way that, say, washing dishes did. I'm quite happy to be doing what I'm doing, and I feel very lucky. — Patrick DeWitt

[...] Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...] — Charles Stross

We write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are. — Tahereh Mafi

The great problem there is we have to have the cooperation of those other Asian countries. — Samuel P. Huntington

Sometimes I think people think poetry must be filled with flowery language, thesaurus-driven vocabulary or the dreaded "purple prose," which is often prevalent in my genre...But oftentimes the best poetry isn't difficult to understand at all. It's the juxtaposition of the words. The line breaks. The enjambs. The shape of the poem. Or the double meanings the positioning of the words make the reader feel or think or do. — R.B. O'Brien

I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I ... I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what? — Angela Carter

Probably the best way to describe my writing style is to refer you to "purple prose", which was a tag given to the early mass market magazine writers earning a half cent a word for their fiction. They had to use every adjective, verb and adverb in the English language to add word count to stories in order to feed and support families. — Tom Johnson

Her blank eyes burrowed through the fetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes, but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung. — Stella Gibbons

At the very least, I hope it means I will get my Briony back again. I know, I'll hold a party for her--and take her on a pony ride--I think that will be quite in order, if I can be spared from my official duties for the afternoon."

"You're the King," Taris reminded him with a smile.

"But you're my conscience, Taris, you know that."

"Then your conscience says we should keep his highness's current location secret, but an announcement of his escape is most desirable. Therefore, a party is quite in order--if not essential--for the morale of the nation."

"Excellent. I really should promote you, old friend. Only trouble is, there's nowhere to go but down from your office."

"I am well aware of that, Your Majesty. — Julia Golding

So many large words, as though the syllables will hide the truth. — Sharon Mock

I put a sour cherry pastille on my tongue, but the combination jarred. A meaty, protein taste was called for. With a cool skin, sticky sweet fragrance in the nostrils, the aleatory drip of timeless water echoing in your ears, a limbo beyond the muscle spindles... you become a spiced mummy in a cool chamber beneath the Nile. This salt-surfeited breeze tingling every corpuscle of my skin set me adrift on a cool back eddy near a basser sea... but the wave lap and sibilance of the palm leaves was like the rustle of a costly veil... in what exotic world did a vortex of primary colours drain into the eyes?... did it all make me a taffeted plankter drinking substance from the spectrum of a fractured sun?"

-"Cancerous Kisses of Crocodiles — William Scott Home

Purple prose attracts attention more than converts. — Jeffrey Toobin

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose. — Cyril Connolly

When on the eve of glory, whilst brooding over the prospects of a bright and happy future, whilst meditating upon the risky right of justice, there we remain, wanderers on the cloudy surface of mental woe, disappointment and danger, inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated imagery, partakers of the poisonous dregs of concocted injustice. Yet such is life. — Amanda McKittrick Ros

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

Don't leave us again, Lana," he whispered roughly. "Don't leave me. Stay. Please. — R.K. Lilley

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

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

A quarter-moon smeared a feverish glow on the marble slabs and dappled the trodden weeds that beleaguered them with a pale dewy leprosy; only the massy shadows which clustered around the trunks of the ancient oaks and beeches escaped its infection. — William Scott Home