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Descriptive Prose Quotes

Browse 23 quotes about Descriptive Prose.

Descriptive Prose Quotes

“They caught up their horses and turned back. Nothing moved in that high wilderness save the wind. They did not speak. They were men of another time for all that they bore christian names and they had lived all their lives in a wilderness as had their fathers before them. They'd learnt war by warring, the generations driven from the eastern shore across a continent, from the ashes at Gnadenhutten onto the prairies and across the outlet to the bloodlands of the west. If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”

EvilWesternNative AmericanDescriptive Prose
Author:Cormac McCarthy
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“Some people will tell you that Toronto, in the summer, is the nothing more than a cesspool of pollution, garbage, and the smells of a hundred ethnicities competing for top spot in a race won historically by curry, garlic, and the occasional cauldron of boiled cabbage. Take a walk down College Street West, Gerrard Street East, or the Danforth, and you'll see; then, they add—these people, complaining—that the stench is so pervasive, so incorrigible, nor merely for lack of wind, but for the ninety-nine percent humidity, which, after a rainstorm, adds an eradicable bottom-note of sweaty Birkenstocks and the organic tang of decaying plant life. This much is true; there is, however, more to the story. Take a walk down the same streets and you'll find racks of the most stunning saris—red with navy brocade, silver, canary, vermillion and chocolate; marts with lahsun and adrak, pyaz and pudina; windows of gelato, zeppole, tiramisu; dusty smoke shops with patio-bistros; you'll find dove-white statuary of Olympian goddesses, mobs in blue jerseys, primed for the World Cup—and more, still, the compulsory banter of couples who even after forty years can turn foul words into the bawdiest, more unforgettable laughter (and those are just the details). Beyond them is the container, the big canvas brushed with parks and valleys and the interminable shore; a backdrop of ferries and islands, gulls and clouds—sparkles of a million wave-tips as the sun decides which colours to leave on its journey to new days. No, Toronto, in the summer, is the most paradisiacal place in the world.”

DiversityLiterary FictionTorontoBeauty In NatureDescriptive Prose
Book:Paradise
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“Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, toasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood.) For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home. The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire, until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its size in a meal of scraps of meat.”

FoodDetailsDescriptive ProseDescription WowDelicious Prose
Book:The Ocean at the End of the Lane
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“Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become.”

BeautifulHorrorWomanMomentWerewolfGypsyCameraPhotoDescriptive Prose
Book:Bloodline Gypsy: Jook and Gypsies vol. 1
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“What are you?' She asked. He shot her a brief glance and looked away. He stared at the scenery of the pastures and distant rows of trees. She knew he was not going to answer the question. In the brightening daylight, she could see that most of the blood on him was restricted to his mouth and hands. It dawned on her that it wasn't his blood, but the blood of something he had caught and eaten.”

BloodGoreWerewolfFull MoonHorror BookDescriptive ProseJook And GypsiesShirley A Martin
Book:Bengalo Moon: Jook and Gypsies Vol. 2
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“The day was warm; but the fact that the sky was covered with a filmy veil of grey clouds gave to the vast plain before him the appearance of a landscape whose dominant characteristic consisted in a patient effacement of all emphatic or outstanding qualities. The green of the meadows was a shy, watery green. The verdure of the elm trees was a sombre, blackish monotony. The yellow of the stubble land was a whitish-yellow, pallid and lustreless.”

SkyLandscapeDescriptive Prose
Book:Wolf Solent
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“There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.”

1920sPartiesDescriptive ProseGatsby
Book:The Great Gatsby
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