Purple Prose Quotes

“When on the eve of glory, whilst brooding over the prospects of a bright and happy future, whilst meditating upon the risky right of justice, there we remain, wanderers on the cloudy surface of mental woe, disappointment and danger, inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated imagery, partakers of the poisonous dregs of concocted injustice. Yet such is life.”
― Amanda McKittrick Ros, Irene Iddesleigh

“The river - with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o'er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs' white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory - is a golden fairy stream.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“So many large words, as though syllables will hide the truth.”
― Sharon Mock, She Walks in Shadows

“There was a sylvan attitude of somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view.”
― O. Henry

“His young man's limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Her blank eyes burrowed through the fetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes, but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“I put a sour cherry pastille on my tongue, but the combination jarred. A meaty, protein taste was called for. With a cool skin, sticky sweet fragrance in the nostrils, the aleatory drip of timeless water echoing in your ears, a limbo beyond the muscle spindles... you become a spiced mummy in a cool chamber beneath the Nile. This salt-surfeited breeze tingling every corpuscle of my skin set me adrift on a cool back eddy near a basser sea... but the wave lap and sibilance of the palm leaves was like the rustle of a costly veil... in what exotic world did a vortex of primary colours drain into the eyes?... did it all make me a taffeted plankter drinking substance from the spectrum of a fractured sun?"

-"Cancerous Kisses of Crocodiles”
― William Scott Home

“A quarter-moon smeared a feverish glow on the marble slabs and dappled the trodden weeds that beleaguered them with a pale dewy leprosy; only the massy shadows which clustered around the trunks of the ancient oaks and beeches escaped its infection.”
― William Scott Home, Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons

“So many large words, as though the syllables will hide the truth.”
― Sharon Mock

“When Mary Lee awoke in the morning, she was in a vanilla-plain room, under crispy sheets, with white waffled blankets. Next to her bed was its identical twin. White and waffled. Waiting.”
― Caroline B. Cooney, Twins

“... shown beneath the map of the galaxy - was an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings, combed and braided by the resonant forces of a dozen glazed and candied moons.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“exotic meant exorbitant pricing. Smaller shipments meant exclusivity.”
― Wren Jones, Damsels and Dinosaurs