#prose

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry. ↗

— Michael Tippett

#changed #extra #fascinating #go #into

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut! ↗

— Kenneth Koch

#box #clicking #clicks #endless #experienced

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process. ↗

— Lionel Trilling

#carries #else #end #every #form

The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author. ↗

— Scott Turow

#burden #carry #proof #prosecutor #really

But I have the satisfaction, at the same time, to reflect that the impression to be made depends upon the consistency of the charge and the motives of the prosecutors. ↗

— Robert Walpole

#consistency #depends #i #impression #made

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[...]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. ↗

— George Orwell

#literature #orwell #poet #poetry #prose

Objects and Objectives To contemplate LEGO. Many colours. Many shapes. Many inventive and useful shapes. Plastic. A versatile and practical substance. Symbolic of the resourcefulness of man. Oil taken from the depths of the very earth. Distillation of said raw material. Chemical processes. Pollution. Creating a product providing hours of constructive play. For children all over the world. Teaching our young. Through enjoyment. Preparing them for further resourcefulness. The progress of our kind. A book. Many books. Proud liners of walls. Fingered. Taken out with great care. Held open. Gazed upon / into with something like awe. A medium for the recording of and communication of knowledge. From the many to the many. Down the ages. And of art. And of love. But do you hear the trees outside whispering? Do their voices haunt you? No wonder. They are calling for their brothers. Pulped. Pressed. Coated. Printed. Bound. And for their other brothers which made the shelves to hold them. And for the roof over them as well. From the very beginning - everything at cost. A cave man, to get food, had to deal with the killing. And the bones from one death proved very useful for implementing the death of another. ↗

— Jay Woodman

#books #cave-man #death #killing #knowledge

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble. ↗

— Nadeem Aslam

#prose #war #life

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#concentration #fused #glowing #glued #i

To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art. ↗

— Francine Prose

#art