Top 100 Quotes About Prose And Poetry
#2. One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
#3. We will remain unwritten through history, no X will mark us on the map; but in books of prose and poetry, you loved me once, in a paragraph.
Lang Leav
#4. An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.
William C. Brown
#5. We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.
Ernst Haas
#7. The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#8. Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
Clive James
#9. In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
Victor Hugo
#10. 3 P's are my soulmates: Pain, Prose and Poetry.
Vinita Kinra
#11. 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.
#12. 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
#13. Hasten Little Maiden
...
stop and listen
for pearls of wisdom
stop and listen
as the river glistens ...
Muse
#14. 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.
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. i am changing
and i am loving change.
AVA.
#18. 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
#19. 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.
#20. no one needs love from you
more than you need love from you.
love yourself first,
and you will always be in love.
AVA.
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. stay curious and stay the brave, strong, unrelenting soldier of love that you are.
AVA.
#24. Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan
#25. The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
Michael Longley
#26. Bad bananas are like push-up bras
a promise of tenderness can deliver tasteless mush, and we're not supposed to complain.
Kate Lebo
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Calico Kitty
My calico kitty
was painted and primed
she could prowl
the night away ~
without spending a dime...
Muse
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.
Pattiann Rogers
#42. i swallowed the syllables of your name
and i was full.
AVA.
#43. One day I will laugh and no loneliness will fall out.
Te' V. Smith
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Tender Ember
... Barred and branded
to be forever unloved
I was a tender ember
seeking solace from above ...
Muse
#48. 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
#49. there is a difference between
loneliness and solitude,
one will empty you and
one will fill you.
you have the power to choose.
AVA.
#50. 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
#51. 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.
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Lollypop
... the passion contained merely kisses
placed upon lips, neck and cheek
these young lovers of the castle
of which our fairytale speaks ...
Muse
#55. I read a lot of prose poetry and get inspired by more-so just a state of mind.
William Beckett
#56. Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.
Christopher Fry
#57. Flames moved towards him
and dropped within
-
singed and marred
his tender skin ...
(the frightful plight tale)
Muse
#58. 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
#59. Dark and pregnant clouds gave birth and fist-sized stones of hail hammered the earth.
Michael R. Fletcher
#60. 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.
#61. 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
#62. Cradle of Solitude
For we know not why our tribulations
are given as such
our fragile forms
created from the dust ...
Muse
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
Camille Paglia
#67. Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
Donald Hall
#68. Gilds the crenelated towers of the churches here and there, Intensifies the hue of flowers makes thy lovely face more fair.
Marguerite De Angeli
#69. you came in slowly like the fog
and consumed me.
AVA.
#70. 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
#71. The true notion is that the material universe is a sign or an indication of what God is. We look at the purity of the snowflake and we see something of the goodness of God. The world is full of poetry: it is sin which turns it into prose.
Fulton J. Sheen
#72. i am awake and alive
and swollen and heavy
with love.
AVA.
#73. 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
#74. Do You Believe
Do you believe
that I have loved you
since the dawn of time?
Do you believe
that we were destined
to be intertwined? ...
Muse
#75. i am like the moon--
sometimes, full.
sometimes, black.
sometimes,
forever and ever alone.
AVA.
#76. He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head, and though he said he'd come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one for I have used them myself and there is no coming back. Minds like ours are can't be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.
Charlotte Eriksson
#77. i am a woman
and i am alone,
and i cannot tell
which one of the two
i love being more.
AVA.
#78. The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style ... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#79. they told her, "fear the reaper."
she laughed to herself and muttered, 'baby, death ain't nothing' more than a quick fuck.
a little bit of silence after he comes.
Taylor Rhodes
#80. I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry ... and I think it's nicer ... ' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed ... 'to look at it through poetry.
L.M. Montgomery
#81. Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.
Tracy K. Smith
#82. If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.
Helen Vendler
#83. She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.'
'Prose and pudding?'
'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
John Fowles
#84. Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
Walter Savage Landor
#85. Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.
Jeanette Winterson
#86. Maybe they will only find one another by being somewhere they have never been and maybe none of this has a thing to do with forgiveness but home doesn't always resemble the path.
Mikl Paul
#87. Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#88. I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#89. I like to move around in the landscape between poetry and prose, between the lyrical and the narrative.
Rigoberto Gonzalez
#90. I'm fighting my way into existence, and I will keep doing so until the end of time.
Charlotte Eriksson
#91. Like dreams and works of art, fantasies are far more than what they appear to be on the surface. They're complex psychic creations whose symbolic content mustn't be translated into literal intent. Think poetry, not prose,
Esther Perel
#92. i do not know how to live tepidly.
i was never built to fit in.
i live by my soul
and my soul is insane.
AVA.
#93. I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well,
a contradiction I never figured out.
Charlotte Eriksson
#94. The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.
Edgar Allan Poe
#95. Do You Believe
... on this road of life
on this day
I take you
now husband and wife ...
Muse
#96. Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Gunter Grass
#97. I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
Jorge Luis Borges
#98. For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas.
Pattiann Rogers
#99. 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
#100. I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.
Robert Frost
