Descriptive Prose Quotes

#1. In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the under side, translating them into a new language.

E.B. White

#2. The two events were probably unrelated, but both jolted Dave the way a sudden air pocket reminds nervous passengers that they're soaring above the clouds in a pressurized metal tube.

Dan Sofer

#3. A bruised silence descended on the van.

Hillary Jordan

#4. A shaft of moonlight illuminated a row of sentinel silver birch in a phosphorescent glow, appearing almost ethereal in the relative surrounding gloom. Boris had stopped again, his silhouette a stark black juxtaposition against the background of illuminated branches.

R.D. Ronald

#5. There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves.

Linda Grant

#6. How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that's been shaken. There's a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it's now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris. (p30)

Craig Silvey

#7. Los Angeles is seven suburbs in search of a city.

Alexander Woollcott

#8. Even as winter comes, mornings are crisp, and the big, blue sky seems to hang newly washed over the sea of hills.

Deborah Lawrenson

#9. Night came early to this neighborhood, the sun fleeing the sky, leaving heaven black and blue.

Lisa Scottoline

#10. The summer came upon the country like a conqueror.

W. Somerset Maugham

#11. After a week he was moved to a different wing and into a shared six-by-eight with a grizzled old con called Alf. He had faded tattoos that stained most of the visible skin on his hands, arms and neck a dull blue, sharp eyes and a thick beard that made his mouth look like an axe wound on a bear.

R.D. Ronald

#12. The ghouls leered at her, unbreathing, their flesh crisply necrotic like rice paper pressed over old oozing wounds.

Scott Lynch

#13. Some scents sparkle and then quickly disappear, like the effervescence of ctirus zestor a bright note of mint.

Deborah Lawrenson

#14. And it sounds like two tectonic plates are getting it on somewhere beneath us

Daniel Jose Older

#15. Around the outside of the room other beautiful women wearing little or nothing at all flitted between the infatuated, intoxicated men, sometimes luring them away for a private dance. The men would follow obediently, weighed down by lust and credit cards.

R.D. Ronald

#16. 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

#17. She could see now that some of the grime that covered him was blood. He looked to be six or seven years old. His ribs were showing and his belly sunk in towards his spine, leaving a hollow above his hips.

Shirley A. Martin

#18. The sun, like a boil on the bright blue ass of day, rolled gradually forward and spread its legs wide to reveal the pubic thatch of night, a hairy darkness in which stars crawled like lice, and the moon crabbed slowly upward like an albino dog tick striving for the anal gulch.

Joe R. Lansdale

#19. His skin was blotched as a dying banana.

David Mitchell

#20. Somewhere deep inside, his humanity had been shaken by something so unnatural, so foreign in its essence, his very being withdrew from it ...

Tamara Rose Blodgett

#21. Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red.

R.D. Ronald

#22. A voice called out, cold as chloroform and old shame.

Scott Lynch

#23. the tall white windmills that came to her mind. How their skinny long arms all turned, but never together, except for just once in a while two of them would be turning the same way, their arms poised at the same place in the sky.

Elizabeth Strout

#24. Because of the foulness of her mother's emotional river, a current which ran swift, changing its path without warning ...

Tamara Rose Blodgett

#25. Dave was a confirmed serotonin junkie. Any day of the year, he chose a good book, a hot cupper, and air-conditioning over jeopardy to life and limb.

Dan Sofer

#26. A shrieking battle cry echoed on the wind, a spine-tingling scream that sounded like the baying of the wolves closing in on their prey.

Raymond E. Feist

#27. The moon hung heavy over the lake like an overripe orange, trickling its golden stream of light across inky depths.

Julie Lessman

#28. Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.

Sarah Hall

#29. I could see tongues of dense fog licking over the ridge in the distance, where this world ended and the next one began, cold, damp, and sunless.

Ransom Riggs

#30. [T]welve year old Libby O'Shea coasted on a homemade swing, toes touching a blinding-blue heaven dolloped with clouds.

Julie Lessman

#31. The blast of hot air lifted Tazeem from his feet and threw him onto his back in the road. He blinked up into the night sky; raindrops glowed orange as they fell towards the earth.

R.D. Ronald

#32. Her shoes were comfortable. They reflected her hope for the evening.

William Peter Blatty

#33. Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine

Tanith Lee