Short Prose Quotes & Sayings

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle ... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably. — John Cheever

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets. — Charles De Lint

One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings. — Ng Yi-Sheng

Whoever will take the trouble of reading the book ascribed to Isaiah, will find it one of the most wild and disorderly compositions ever put together; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end; and, except a short historical part, and a few sketches of history in the first two or three chapters, is one continued incoherent, bombastical rant, full of extravagant metaphor, without application, and destitute of meaning; a school-boy would scarcely have been excusable for writing such stuff; it is (at least in translation) that kind of composition and false taste that is properly called prose run mad. — Thomas Paine

In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, 'One of those things,' impelling me to remark to my cousin, 'Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn't time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel that he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it's being written. — William, Saroyan

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time. — Mary Karr

Poetry vs. Prose

One difference of course
is the length of the line.
And some people suppose
that prose doesn't rhyme.

But I have a theory
that's more like a question:
If prose is lengthy fiction
is poetry short suggestion? — Daniel Klawitter

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age. — Arundhati Roy

But aren't all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos
we know what's out there. It's what isn't that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet lags
four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon
but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant
sail for Asia and stumble on America
and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along. — Jess Walter

EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom. — Ambrose Bierce

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

When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium. — Truman Capote

Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. — Gabrielle Zevin

With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk — Herbert Gold

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything ... he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys. — Jack Kerouac Atop An Underwood Early Stories And Other Writings

The Ploughmen is as good a book as I've read in years. Kim Zupan's language is as rich as Cormac McCarthy's, and like Cormac's, it comes from ground-zero of the heart. I'm also reminded of James Lee Burke's sure-footed prose and delight in metaphor. Luminous ... nothing short of brilliant ... a firstnovel that leaves me impatient for the next. — Rick DeMarinis

I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy! — Megan Amram

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressivee
that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life
live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition. — Tennessee Williams

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey) — Kellie Elmore

Certainly I'm participating in an already established and awesome tradition, but it's a tradition that sort of shoots up and through the mainstream in short bursts and pulses and then gets diluted. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson shot up and then got sucked back down underground under more entertaining and less radical versions of body and self - poetry and prose that posited bodies in more perfect union with good citizenship. — Lidia Yuknavitch

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

Mr. Wodehouse is a prose stylist of such startling talent that Frankie nearly skipped around with glee when she first read some of his phrases. Until her discovery of Something Fresh on the top shelf of Ruth's bookshelf one bored summer morning, Frankie's leisure reading had consister primarily of paperback mysteries she found on the spinning racks at the public library down the block from her house, and the short stories of Dorothy Parker. Wodehouse's jubilant wordplay bore itself into her synapses like a worm into a fresh ear of corn. — E. Lockhart

If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee? — Ryan Goodrich

We do not know if she collapsed because of overwhelming joy, extreme surprise, grave disappointment, or heavy anxiety that for the next months and years she would live with a human male, because in fact she had been honest when she told her girlfriends that she had given up on men, OR NONE OF THE ABOVE. — Kyoko Yoshida

Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories. — Tea Obreht

[The] defining characteristics of good prose [are]: a preference for short sentences diversified by an occasionally very long one; a tone that is relaxed and almost colloquial; a large vocabulary that enjoys exploiting the different etymological and social levels of words; and an insistence on verbal and logical precision. — F.W. Bateson

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[ ... ]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. — George Orwell

Of little use, the man you may suppose,
Who says in verse what others say in prose;
Yet let me show a poet's of some weight,
And (though no soldier) useful to the state,
What will a child learn sooner than a song?
What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
What's long or short, each accent where to place
And speak in public with some sort of grace? — Alexander Pope

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter. — Nicholas Royle

But like all beautiful faces Emily's made you believe that its possessor was a better person than she was. It allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret, and for all her talent could no longer manage to string twenty-five paragraphs fo prose together to make a short story. — Michael Chabon

A short story is a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal ... having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out ... — Edgar Allan Poe

Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety. — T. S. Eliot

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels. — Greg Rucka

I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible. — PJ Harvey

I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts. — Susan Hill

Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels - including short stories under the head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. — Theodore Roosevelt

I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface. — Susan Griffin

We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal — Edgar Allan Poe

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

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end. — Haruki Murakami