Quotessence
Home / Topics / Prose Quotes

Prose Quotes

Browse 1129 quotes about Prose.

Related topics

Prose Quotes

“What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.”

“You yearn to stay in this in-between place, where the beauty of the times you have freshly bade farewell to is still alive and vivid in your mind – almost real – and the reality of your new circumstances has yet to fully sink in. You listen to the familiar melodies that had accompanied you on your journey, and allow the music to evoke landscapes and scenes in your mind. The songs caress your sub-consciousness and fill your being with an airy joy. You are both here and elsewhere. Or perhaps you are everywhere and nowhere.”

“Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.”

“THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape. When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man. She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street. For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel’s apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit. She couldn’t get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.”

“Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourself and let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story. Let your very identity be your book. Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.”

“Little Maiden Encounters Fear Deepest regions walked she there little maiden sweet and fair ventured far from the path never a whisper never a laugh...”

“Do you know these days? These days when the alarm rings, and there's no energy left to get up because you think that today nothing will change and nothing good will happen anyway? I had that feeling when I woke up this morning. The dream I had dreamt passed into the next day without any transition, and I cried myself awake. The alarm rang. I felt horrible, and I didn't know where I was. My dreams have always been very vivid, very real – it can be a blessing and a curse. Today it had been a curse. Usually, you cry yourself to sleep – but on particular days, you cry yourself awake. Years ago, which I can count on the fingers of both of my hands, I would have felt very much at home in this feeling. I would have wallowed in it. Melancholy had been my very best friend for oh so many years. But it's not like that anymore. Life is radiant and colourful. Even though there are days that seem dull and grey. But even those days will pass. Joy is an active choice. Sometimes you have to even fight for it. But one day, you will be richly gifted. Then you will gain something that weighs more than all the loneliness, the guilt, the sadness: pure life. Some time ago, I consciously decided against surrendering to the grey within me. And I promised myself to leave my bed every day, even on the days that seemed dull and grey, and to throw myself into the day the same way I wanted to throw myself into life. Life is the only thing we can call our very own. And if the grey appears to be too grey, one has to show one's true colours. Inside and out. And that's why I wear red because a pop of colour can frighten away the grey.”

“I don’t understand why? Why me? Why now? Why does everything happen at once? We fall apart, just like that. Everything was fine, then it all turns to dust. I don’t understand why nothing feels right? Why I can’t fight for my rights? Why do my days melt together like snow? It hurts me to know That you might not make it below. This horrible time in our lives, Day by day, night by night. Will I ever understand? Will this feeling ever end? Can the frayed be made amend? I can’t talk to anyone. I can’t let it out. I’m gonna blow up, I gotta get out. Can you hear me? Restore my peace? Why? I don’t understand. Please put the broken pieces Of my life back together and attend To the needs of my screams. Someone listen to me, please.”

“It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now, and I'm not letting go.”

“If accuracy, fidelity, and the strictest attention to the letter of the text, be supposed to constitute the qualities of an excellent version, this of all versions, must, in general, be accounted the most excellent. Every sentence, every word, every syllable, and every letter and point, seems to have been weighed with the nicest exactitude; and expressed, either in the text, or margin, with the greatest precision”

“... so this is for us. This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and love and this is for doing it even if no one will ever know because the beauty is in the act of doing it. Not what it can lead to. This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playing and no one is around and they will never know but I will forever remember and that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have, and this is for you who write or play or read or sing by yourself with the light off and door closed when the world is asleep and the stars are aligned and maybe no one will ever hear it or read your words or know your thoughts but it doesn’t make it less glorious. It makes it ethereal. Mysterious. Infinite. For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe in and only you can decide how much it meant and means and will forever mean and other people will experience it too through you. Through your spirit. Through the way you talk. Through the way you walk and love and laugh and care and I never meant to write this long but what I want to say is: Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourself and let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story. Let your very identity be your book. Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody. So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountain where no one will ever hear and your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar. Make your life be your art and you will never be forgotten.”

“We do not see the grey working day, the cap and gown, the note-books, the feet burning from the pavements of picture galleries, but things ' that set the spirit free for a moment,' ' stirring of the senses/ ' strange dyes,' ' strange colours and curious odours,' ' work of the artist's hands,' ' passionate attitudes.' It is not the style of ecstasy such as can be seen in Jefferies' Story of My Heart, or Sterne's Journal to Eliza, or Keats' last letter to Fanny Brawne. Hardly does it appear to be the style of remembered ecstasy as in Traherne's Centuries of Meditation or Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. It is free from traces of experience. All is subtilised, intellectualised, ' casting off all debris.' It is a polished cabinet of collections from history, nature, and art ; objects detached from their settings but almost never without being integrated afresh by Pater's careful arrangement, whether they are pictures, books, landscapes or personalities. It fulfils Pater's own condition of art by putting its own ' happy world ' in place of ' the meaner world of our common days.”

“You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss like chains tight around my chest, and if you see a fire from the shore tonight it’s my chains going up in flames.”