Prose Poetry Quotes

“and i said to my body. softly. ‘i want to be your friend.’ it took a long breath. and replied ‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything,
at any time,
and I am not your fault.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“So you will meet many ’someones’ who will give a new definition to your name.
And you can not build walls, must not close the door and please don’t hide,
because if you ask me about hurt
and love
I will say love. Love because the hurt will come and go no matter what, but only love makes it worth while. Only love can cure it.
Don’t be scared. Go. Love.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty
and there I make it work.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.”
― Ania Walwicz

“Of the many forms that silence takes, the most memorable is the dry husk of the cicada.”
― Jon Davis

“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, Lay the Marble Tea

“A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas. As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one’s mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane. And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.”
― Adam Zagajewski

“About sexuality of English mice.

A warm perfume is growing little by little in the room. An orchard scent, a caramelized sugar scent. Mrs. MOUSE roasts apples in the chimney. The apple fruits smell grass of England and the pastry oven. On a thread drawn in the flames, the apples, from the buried autumn, turn a golden color and grind in tempting bubbles.
But I have the feeling that you already worry. Mrs. MOUSE in a Laura Ashley apron, pink and white stripes, with a big purple satin bow on her belt, Mrs. MOUSE is certainly not a free mouse? Certainly she cooks all day long lemon meringue tarts, puddings and cheese pies, in the kitchen of the burrow. She suffocates a bit in the sweet steams, looks with a sigh the patched socks trickling, hanging from the ceiling, between mint leaves and pomegranates. Surely Mrs. MOUSE just knows the inside, and all the evening flavours are just good for Mrs. MOUSE flabbiness.
You are totally wrong - we can forgive you – we don’t know enough that the life in the burrow is totally communal. To pick the blackberries, the purplish red elderberries, the beechnuts and the sloes Mr. and Mrs. MOUSE escape in turn, and glean in the bushes the winter gatherings. After, with frozen paws, intoxicated with cold wind, they come back in the burrow, and it’s a good time when the little door, rond little oak wood door brings a yellow ray in the blue of the evening. Mr. and Mrs. MOUSE are from outside and from inside, in the most complete commonality of wealth and climate.
While Mrs. MOUSE prepares the hot wine, Mr. MOUSE takes care of the children. On the top of the bunk bed Thimoty is reading a cartoon, Mr. MOUSE helps Benjamin to put a fleece-lined pyjama, one in a very sweet milky blue for snow dreams.
That’s it … children are in bed ….
Mrs. MOUSE blazes the hot wine near the chimney, it smells lemon, cinnamon, big dry flames, a blue tempest. Mr. and Mrs. MOUSE can wait and watch. They drink slowly, and then .... they will make love ….You didn’t know? It’s true, we need to guess it. Don’t expect me to tell you in details the mice love in patchwork duvets, the deep cherry wood bed. It’s just good enough not to speak about it. Because, to be able to speak about it, it would need all the perfumes, all the silent, all the talent and all the colors of the day. We already make love preparing the blackberries wine, the lemon meringue pie, we already make love going outside in the coldness to earn the wish of warmness and come back. We make love downstream of the day, as we take care of our patiences.
It’s a love very warm, very present and yet invisible, mice’s love in the duvets.
Imagine, dream a bit ….. Don’t speak too badly about English mice’s sexuality …..”
― Philippe DELERM

“Swirled tight, trussed, manic, most trusted. You love hills, swells, waves of sand, waves of water. You love traffic on bridges that might split in two. You love stairs leading to stairs leading to ice cream stands. Shards of pottery as good as a map. You love fractured control towers and the very broken Alaskan Way Viaduct. You love squat corner stores and barber-pole signs. You love the idea of privacy in a city of windows, the idea of light in a city of shadows.”
― Carol Guess, Tinderbox Lawn

“In the mountains they saw deer in the headlights and in the headlights the deer were pale as ghosts and as soundless. They turned their red eyes toward this unreckoned sun and sidled and grouped and leapt the bar ditch by ones and twos. A small doe lost her footing on the macadam and scrabbled wildly and sank onto her hindquarters and rose again and vanished with the others into the chaparral beyond the roadside.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as is own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing groundshudder watching it till it was gone. Then he turned and went back into the house.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“... when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“... the moon that was already risen raced among the high wires by the highway side like a single silver music note burning in the constant and lavish dark...”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence. A veiled, unavailable body makes an available space.”
― Harryette Mullen, Trimmings

“Indeed, whether it is Plato or al-Ghazali who is right about whether the exterior of the cave is attainable in this life, the fact of Surat al-Kahf remains: a cave is not a place to stay forever.”
― Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Seeing For Ourselves and Even Stranger Possibilities

“Prose appeals the mind,
Poetry sinks in to your soul.”
― Siya Taara

“I look you in the eyes, and you come to rest in the presence of my unspoken opinion. At last, you gained the clarity you were searching for. And after receiving the long-awaited answer, you join me in the warm gaze at the summer life behind the window. Finally, it was clear to the both of us, that the thinking was over, and we no longer had to play the game of "Figure It Out".”
― Elliott Black

“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

“In the depths of contemplation, we encounter the curiosities of reality: the way a breeze can carry whispers of ancient stories, the rustling leaves speaking a language only the soul can comprehend. Each droplet of rain becomes a prism through which we glimpse reflections of ourselves, fragmented yet whole.

We reclaim forgotten pieces of our identity in the most unexpected places-a fleeting smile from a stranger, the scent of pine on a winter’s night, the laughter of children echoing in the distance. These ephemeral moments remind us that the present is a mosaic, intricately crafted from the past yet ever vibrant with potential.”
― Nicholas Kyle Edwards, Interrelation and Other Works

“Break through the resistance
Without any assistance
Bridge this distance
Change your existence
Through constant persistence.”
― Tanja Lilic, Sun Beyond the Mountain: Real Life Poetry

“She jumped a little—Nettie Cobb had the face and almost painfully shy manner of a woman made to jump at voices, no matter how soft and friendly, when they spoke from the general area of her elbow—and smiled at him nervously”
― Stephen King, Needful Things

“Some poets have argued that the rejection of line carries a kind of political charge, just as poets once felt that the rejection of rhyming verse for blank verse or blank verse for free verse carried a political charge. This may be true in a particular time at a particular place. But it cannot be true categorically. For example, even if the heroic couplet was once associated with hierarchical thinking in the eighteenth century, it does not follow that the heroic couplet will always inevitably be doomed to reproduce the same hierarchies in our thought. The relationship between formal choice and ideological position is constantly shifting, and it isn’t possible to predict the repercussions of formal decisions except inasmuch as we might see them played out in the work of individual poets.”
― James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line

“There is no such thing as prose. There is the alphabet, and then there are verses which are more or less closely knit, more or less diffuse. So long as there is a straining toward style, there is versification.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“A poet is he who feels what others feel but in extremity of feeling; to which we may add, the gift of using words fitly, words not so much chosen as drawn, like matter drawn by magnetism, out of an infinite atmosphere of them.”
― Llewelyn Prose

“I sat there staring dumbly at the expense account and wondering, in a half-stupid way, how such a pretty color as red ever got mixed up with so black a thing as being broke.”
― Charles Beaumont, Twilight Zone: The Original Stories

“The writer was once invited to Oxford to take part in a debate about the difference between prose and poetry. His opponent spoke for almost two hours. Behan rose to his feet and promised to be brief. He recited an old Dublin rhyme.

​"There was a young fella named Rollocks
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks.
As he walked on the strand
With a girl by the hand
The water came up to his ankles."

​“That,” declared Behan, “is prose. But if the tide had been in it would have been poetry.”
― Brendan Behan

“Attention is weightless.”
― Karan Kapoor