Prose Quotes

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

George Orwell

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

Virginia Woolf

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

Oscar Wilde

- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.- Never use a long word where a short one will do.- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.- Never use the passive where you can use the active.- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

George Orwell

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

Ernest Hemingway