Top 100 Prose Poetry Quotes
#1. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
#2. In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.
Forrest Gander
#3. I read a lot of prose poetry and get inspired by more-so just a state of mind.
William Beckett
#4. Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Gunter Grass
#5. Prose poetry is not set to a melody or music so there's something freeing about it.
William Beckett
#6. Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
Story Musgrave
#7. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#8. keep following your heart.
it won't always be easy, but it'll be the most important thing you'll do.
AVA.
#9. remember you are capable of the most powerful thing in the universe.
you are capable of love.
AVA.
#10. Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.
Kevin Powers
#11. Hasten Little Maiden
...
stop and listen
for pearls of wisdom
stop and listen
as the river glistens ...
Muse
#12. every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay.
AVA.
#13. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#14. In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Richard M. Nixon
#15. i am changing
and i am loving change.
AVA.
#16. To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
John Ciardi
#17. everyone is in a hurry and things are always disappearing, and i am always left standing here--
alone, waiting for the things that stay.
AVA.
#18. no one needs love from you
more than you need love from you.
love yourself first,
and you will always be in love.
AVA.
#19. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.
Basil Bunting
#20. The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#21. Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
H.L. Mencken
#22. the hope is small
but it is everything.
AVA.
#23. Parting
One is strong, a child now grown
The other weak, a parent aged
-
The strong once feeble
The weak once mighty
-
Time, the infinity
has marked them ...
Muse
#24. stay curious and stay the brave, strong, unrelenting soldier of love that you are.
AVA.
#25. show me all the parts of you
that you do not love
so i know where to begin.
AVA.
#27. Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan
#28. The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
Michael Longley
#29. Bad bananas are like push-up bras
a promise of tenderness can deliver tasteless mush, and we're not supposed to complain.
Kate Lebo
#30. With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
Richard Brautigan
#31. Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry,
Walt Whitman
#32. Every poet ... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
#33. Ode to the Chamber
... linger here amidst the chamber
in which we embrace our love
talk to me of sonnets
and call me turtledove ...
Muse
#36. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
Robert Lowell
#37. I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.
Matthea Harvey
#38. I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
Shelby Foote
#39. Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.
Kirby Wright
#40. i took it off.
i did not want to carry it with me anymore.
AVA.
#42. Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Ezra Pound
#43. i know it all ends the same,
but i was interested in seeing
how you would break my heart.
AVA.
#44. Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.
Edward Hirsch
#45. Calico Kitty
My calico kitty
was painted and primed
she could prowl
the night away ~
without spending a dime...
Muse
#46. There is a deep truth in being at home enough with someone to kiss them while your lips are dry. And happiness may not be the greatest of things to hear, but it should be.
Mikl Paul
#47. One reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#48. The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.
Richard M. Nixon
#49. You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel.
Shannon L. Alder
#50. There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.
Werner Herzog
#51. Yet you stand, too ashamed to run, too fearful to embrace. God I see so much of
what I love in that face.
Suenammi Richards
#52. He left her a note in her right slipper that said when I was alone yesterday I was happy, and I wanted you to know. Because look at how much you've done in me.
Mikl Paul
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.
William C. Brown
#56. Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#57. I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.
Andre Dubus
#58. 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
#59. I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.
Pattiann Rogers
#60. The River Swish
Deftly maneuvered through
the dark green abyss ~
The wooden raft seemed
in tune with this ~
Canorous rush of the
river swish....
Muse
#61. i swallowed the syllables of your name
and i was full.
AVA.
#62. Drop the mind that thinks in prose; revive another kind of mind that thinks in poetry Put aside all your expertise in syllogism; let songs be your way of life. Move from intellect to intuition, from the head to the heart, because the heart is closer to the mysteries.
Osho
#63. One day I will laugh and no loneliness will fall out.
Te' V. Smith
#64. All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.
Norman MacCaig
#65. Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
J.K. Rowling
#66. There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it.
Richard Livingstone
#67. Tender Ember
... Barred and branded
to be forever unloved
I was a tender ember
seeking solace from above ...
Muse
#68. Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
Paul Auster
#69. there is a difference between
loneliness and solitude,
one will empty you and
one will fill you.
you have the power to choose.
AVA.
#70. 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
#72. they say people only hear what they want to hear,
but i don't know if that is always true, i've been wanting to hear your heart and it's as silent as the moon.
AVA.
#73. Watch me go. Watch me. Because you said i couldn't. Because you thought I wouldn't. Go on, cry now. Cry.
Kellie Elmore
#74. Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.
Austin O'Malley
#75. Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.
Harold Bloom
#76. The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose.
Steve Grand
#77. Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
James W. Sire
#79. A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space
a place not just set apart but reverberant
and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
Michael Pollan
#80. Lollypop
... the passion contained merely kisses
placed upon lips, neck and cheek
these young lovers of the castle
of which our fairytale speaks ...
Muse
#81. I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.
Gemma Files
#83. Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.
Christopher Fry
#84. However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
James Schuyler
#85. Flames moved towards him
and dropped within
-
singed and marred
his tender skin ...
(the frightful plight tale)
Muse
#86. The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#87. Dark and pregnant clouds gave birth and fist-sized stones of hail hammered the earth.
Michael R. Fletcher
#88. I ache not from need -
but from my heart's gluttony of you.
Muse
#89. there is something magical and addicting about going somewhere, being alone, and finding yourself in parts of the world you never knew existed, finding parts of yourself you never knew you would find.
AVA.
#90. One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
#91. Gratitude
... here at home our faith dwindles
political division
causes tensions to kindle -
we should never forget
who stands at the door -
who shields us with armor
and shall forever more ...
Muse
#92. Before you came
the world was prose.
Now poetry is born.
Nizar Qabbani
#93. It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
Peter Davison
#94. My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
Tao Lin
#95. Cradle of Solitude
For we know not why our tribulations
are given as such
our fragile forms
created from the dust ...
Muse
#96. Nowhere hidden has ever turned away a goodheart guest.
Mikl Paul
#97. Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema ...
Derek Jarman
#99. Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
Franz Grillparzer
#100. you giver of light.
you lover of love.
you beautiful
beautiful
human being
you.
AVA.
