Poetic Prose Quotes

“I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“Time will cease, disease will fester, and death will die.”
― Lancali ., I Fell in Love With Hope

“Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular. Behind it her teeth shone sharp and white as bone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“I want you to hold me like a grudge, keep me like a promise, haunt me like a ghost.”
― Ann Liang, I Hope This Doesn't Find You

“Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only a species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not . . . not the way his face said he felt.”
― Stephen King, Cujo

“We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.”
― Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

“i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Our story began with uncertainty, and with uncertainty, it ended—not with a bang, but a whisper.”
― Aura Biru, We Are Everyone

“Why do people glorify war?
Do they not see the stench and gore?
All who relish destruction are human no more!”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Illustrious Garden

“Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music!”
― Lori R. Lopez

“...she could not think of what had happened to her that day, or of what might happen that night. Instead, she watched the lamplighters move along the avenues even as their celestial counterparts set the stars alight in the sky. The rain had washed the city clean, and the air was a confection of clematis and violets and peony. Music and light spilled out of so many grand houses that the two seemed at once ubiquitous and united, as if to play a note was to send forth a ray of illumination, and a quartet was enough to set the grandest halls aglitter.”
― Galen M. Beckett, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent

“As she walked, clock towers across Prague started arguing midnight, and the long, fraught Monday came at last to a close.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“APPLES SCENT,
You arrive in the basement. Immediatly it catches you. Apples are here, lying on fruit trays, turned crates. You didn't think about it. You had no wish to be flooded by this melancholic wave. But you can't resist. Apple scent is a breaker. How could you manage without this childhood, bitter and sweet ?
Shrivelled fruits surely are delicious, from this feak dryness where candied taste seems to have wormed in each wrinkle. But you don't wish to eat them. Particularly don't turn into an identifiable taste this floating power of smell. Say that it smells good, strong? But not ..... It's beyond .... An inner scent, scent of a better oneself. Here is shut up school autumn, with purple ink we scratch paper with down strokes and thin strokes. Rain bangs against glasses, evening will be long ....
But apple perfume is more than past. You think about formerly because of fullness and intensity from a remembrance of salpetered cellar, dark attic. But it's to live here, stay here, stand up.
You have behind you high herbs and damp orchards. Ahead it's like a warm blow given in the shade. Scent got all browns, all reds with a bit of green acid. Scent distilled skin softness, its tiny roughness. Lips dried, we alreadyt know that this thirst is not to be slaked.
Nothing would happen if you bite the white flesh. You would need to become october, mud floor, moss of cellar, rain, expectation.
Apple scent is painful. It's from a stronger life, a slowness we deserve no more.”
― Philippe DELERM

“Time held no meaning as my mind darted in and out of memories. Past and present collided to create a full-sensory collage out of my life: playing hide-n-seek with my best friends Luke—who always cheated by walking through walls when he was about to be caught—and Lucy; Mr. Caldrin critiquing my sketches and offering ideas to make them more realistic; targets changing faces, blending into the same person, their thoughts rippling through my mind like waves. Through it all, a demon stalked me from the shadows of my memories, never quite showing its face, but crouching, waiting.

And then I dreamed....”
― Kimberly Kinrade, Forbidden Fire

“Like blood out of a wound, a keening wail rose from the bottom of my heart and ripped through the graveyard. I lowered my face to Hadassah's shoulder and went quietly and thoroughly to pieces.”
― Angela Elwell Hunt, Magdalene

“Poetry is the mightiest vessel for philosophy,
Poetry is the mightiest vessel for science.
Though I started out with prose,
I went through the poetic morph.
Now all my science is poetry,
all my poetry is philosophy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“Yet the pond did not acquire more fish. For the older ones, the graceful ones...the chosen ones, the brilliant ones, the ones gilded with darkness, with flame...were also the ones who ate their young.”
― Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars

“Let's intone the moor-songs and strew golden earth on the coffin.”
― Unica Zürn, The Trumpets of Jericho

“Perhaps I could climb aboard a ship and sail to the farthest corner of the world, where there was only undiscovered wilderness, where I could breathe deep the wet wilds and be so lost in fresh green there was no thought of old red.”
― Elizabeth Lowham, Beauty Reborn

“She feels the shudder that precipitates a sob and tries to repress this particular kind of ugliness.”
― Sally Rooney, At the Clinic

“Antoníto clucked and clicked his arms in mimicry of a clock. When its human hands reached straight out, time stopped. There he lay absolutely still, a cruciform putto on sand angel wings, staring at a Michelangelo sky.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

“And I feel myself falling,
falling,
falling.
Through darkness, through imaginary worlds with water and spiders and stars- where witches who are also angels watch over you.”
― Jenny Torres Sanchez, We Are Not From Here

“To the
poet,

Silence
sings...”
― M P Ceran

“…waar moet het meerkleurige vruchtlichaam bloeien dat met schimmeldraden gevormd werd…”
― Stijn Moreels, Indigo

“De afgetrokken gangmuren vol plekken en putten waren zo dun als liefde.”
― Stijn Moreels

“Nu erai un bărbat frumos, nu erai nici măcar viu. Totul îmi părea extrem de familiar în vechea sală de cinema, de parcă mă născusem din praful aşternut pe podea. Numai tu nu-mi erai cunoscut, dar te priveam cu acel nesaţ cu care sorbi o limonadă într-o după-amiază de vară. Nu ştiu ce anume îmi atrăsese atenţia la persoana ta aproape solubilă. Dacă stau bine să mă gândesc, nu aveai nici ochi, nici nas, nici măcar haine. Erai gol. Ştiam însă cu certitudine ceva despre tine: erai singur, mai singur ca niciodată. Şi te temeai de lumini puternice.”
― Teodora Gheorghe, Întâmplări despre niciodată - 7 povești neobișnuite despre singurătate

“Someone asked me the other day, do I like to write prose better or poetry? To which I can only say - both are fundamental to my works. In fact, I started out with prose, as you might remember - and my most invigorating ideas came to this world in the form of prose. Along the way, I felt a craving for poetry, so quite on a whim I wrote the first sonnet. Suddenly an entire new horizon opened up to me. Eventually prose and poetry became equally potent carrier of my ideas - they became complimentary to each other - they became supplementary to each other. However, I do admit, as I grow older, I'm getting more and more drawn towards poetry as my primary vessel.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One

“It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out past the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach.

Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Down-shore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back.

He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach.

He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“On that day the goosebumps on our skin will read the braille of glory in God's presence. Slander and persecution will remember our names no more, and we will sing with our whole bodies a right now praise because we once gave the truth to a dying world.”
― Preston Perry, How to Tell the Truth: The Story of How God Saved Me to Win Hearts—Not Just Arguments