#prose

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist. ↗

— Tommy Lee Jones

#greatest #language #living #mccarthy #perfect

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass. ↗

— Tracy Kidder

#glass #i #pane #prose #want

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth. ↗

— George Saintsbury

#begun #chaucer #circumstances #early #exercise

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. ↗

— George Saintsbury

#any #best #call #classical #comparative

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical. ↗

— William Shenstone

#felt #frequently #lines #most #musical

In contrast to what most prosecutors do, we try to treat all individuals with complete fairness. We do not go out and hold press conferences and the like. ↗

— Kenneth Starr

#conferences #contrast #fairness #go #hold

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like. ↗

— Laurence Housman

#arrested #avoid #been #bound #charged

APPLES SCENT, You arrive in the basement. Immediatly it catches you. Apples are here, lying on fruit trays, turned crates. You didn't think about it. You had no wish to be flooded by this melancholic wave. But you can't resist. Apple scent is a breaker. How could you manage without this childhood, bitter and sweet ? Shrivelled fruits surely are delicious, from this feak dryness where candied taste seems to have wormed in each wrinkle. But you don't wish to eat them. Particularly don't turn into an identifiable taste this floating power of smell. Say that it smells good, strong? But not ..... It's beyond .... An inner scent, scent of a better oneself. Here is shut up school autumn, with purple ink we scratch paper with down strokes and thin strokes. Rain bangs against glasses, evening will be long .... But apple perfume is more than past. You think about formerly because of fullness and intensity from a remembrance of salpetered cellar, dark attic. But it's to live here, stay here, stand up. You have behind you high herbs and damp orchards. Ahead it's like a warm blow given in the shade. Scent got all browns, all reds with a bit of green acid. Scent distilled skin softness, its tiny roughness. Lips dried, we alreadyt know that this thirst is not to be slaked. Nothing would happen if you bite the white flesh. You would need to become october, mud floor, moss of cellar, rain, expectation. Apple scent is painful. It's from a stronger life, a slowness we deserve no more. ↗

— Philippe Delerm

#life

- 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

#writing #simile

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists. ↗

— Donal Henahan

#estate #most #next #prose #real