Prose Quotes*
*includes the occasional poem from someone who primarily wrote prose, favorites are bolded
Featured Authors
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"...leave me in peace, among all the warm wrong things that I have loved." from "'Wait Til You Have Children of Your Own'"
"I realized that in those two years in order to preserve something - an inner hush maybe, maybe not - I had weaned myself from all of the things I used to love - that every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations... were only what I should do, from other days... I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day." from "The Crack-Up"
"Her eyes, dark and intimate, seemed to have wakened at the growing brilliance of the illuminations overhead; there was the promise of excitement in them now, like the promise of the cooling night."
The Great Gatsby
"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes... wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."
"But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires."
"I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms."
"No amount of fire or freshness can challenged what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
"He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer for the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lip's touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete."
"Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."
"He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
"...he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."
"Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."
"And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
This Side of Paradise
"The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of the moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful."
“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again; and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”
“Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her.”
"Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air."
The Beautiful and Damned
“He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.”
“Both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream”
“There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going.”
"Ecstasy of regret”
“Desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone … the moon, at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of the world, showers its illicit honey over the drowsy street.”
“…the fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.”
“They talked from their hearts - with half-truths and evasions peculiar to that organ, which has never been famed as an instrument of precision.”
“It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.” from “Show Mr and Mrs F to Number -“
"Thousand-and-first Ship" (Poem)
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita
“The security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised - the great rosegray never-to-be-had.”
“The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We have to pay on the mortal sense of beauty.”
"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share"
Transparent Things
"Transparent things, through which the past shines"
"I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius."
"The commonplaces he and she had exchanged blazed with authenticity against the forced guffaws in the bogus bar."
"How fast do dreams catch up with new fashions?"
"Her husband always felt a flow of special tenderness that reconciled him to the boring or brutal ugliness of what not very happy people call 'life' every time he noted in neat, efficient, clear-headed Armande the beauty and helplessness of human abstraction."
"The greyness of rain would soon engulf everything"
"One of those instant unverified visions which can fool the cleverest man"
Laughter in the Dark
"...they had just slid past him, leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is."
Marcel Proust
Swann's Way, trans. Lydia Davis
“We try to rediscover in things, now precious because of it, the glimmer that our soul projected on them; we are disappointed to find that they seem to lack in nature the charm they derived in our thoughts from the proximity of certain ideas; at times we convert all the forces of that soul into cunning, into magnificence, in order to have an effect on people who are outside us, as we are well aware, and whom we will never reach.”
“… I was nevertheless obliged to continue along the road to Combray admitting to myself that there was less and less chance that she had been placed in my path. And if she had been there, would I have dared talk to her? It seemed to me she would have thought that I was mad; I no longer believed that the desires which I formed during my walks, and which were not fulfilled, were shared by other people, that they had any reality outside of me. They now seemed to me no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no long had any attachment to nature, to reality, which from then on lost all its charm and significance…”
“Knowing a thing does not always allow us to prevent it, but at least the things we know, we hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can arrange them as we like, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.”
“‘I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn’t even interesting - because they say she’s an idiot,’ she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.”
Virginia Woolf
The Waves
“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is not beauty enough in the moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.”
“'If I could believe,' said Rhoda, 'that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You did not see me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do--I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view--one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know--your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.”
"Soon, too, a maid came in with a note, and as she turned to answer it and I felt my own curiosity to know what she was writing and to whom, I saw the first leaf fall on his grave. I saw us push beyond this moment, and leave it behind us for ever. And then sitting side by side on the sofa we remembered inevitably what had been said by others; "the lily of the day is fairer far in May"; we compared Percival to a lily--Percival whom I wanted to lose his hair, to shock the authorities, to grow old with me; he was already covered with lilies."
Mrs. Dalloway
"She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on."
"Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened."
"He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square."
"A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre, which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone."
All Prose:
"It was like remembering the details of a dream she once had, that perhaps at some point in her life, there had been things worth screaming and crying over, some deeper truth, or even horror, that everyone around you perpetually denied... [she] could not harness that feeling, only the memory of it, or not even that, but something more remote." from Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
"Of all of the events of his life, these are among the few he never considers telling to anyone. Later he will try to name them, and in the very effort lose his sure sense of what they are." from The Nenoquich by Henry Bean
"'Then,' I cried, half desperate, 'grant me at least a new servitude.'" from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
"The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to act on it. I so dreaded a reply that would crush me with despair. To prolong doubt was to prolong hope." from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
"There can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things" from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italio Calvino, trans. William Weaver
"He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offence, because he knew that view to be under threat." from Outline by Rachel Cusk
"Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened." from The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras, trans. Barbara Bray
"And wasn't it always a matter of indoctrination, and never of really having understood something?" from Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. Michael Hofmann
"It's not impossible that her pretense has long since slipped under her skin" from Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. Michael Hofmann
"And if you are unable to forgive me, will you at least remember that I seek it of you" from Greek Lessons by Han Kang, trans. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won
"She... was soon pretending that she was a blue woman because the dusk later on might be blue... amidst the pretending she needed to speak the truth of an opaque stone so it could contrast with the glinting green pretending, pretends that she loves and is loved, pretends that she doesn't need to die of longing, pretends she's lying in the transparent palm of the hand of God." from An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector, trans. Stefan Tobler
"She was falling into a sadness without pain" from An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector, trans. Stefan Tobler
"Could love be giving your own solitude to another?" from An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector, trans. Stefan Tobler
“At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.” from The Book of Disquiet by Ferdinand Pessoa, trans. Margaret Jull Costa
"My heart vibrant with the static of unelaborated thought." from American Pastoral by Philip Roth
"Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person." from Franny & Zooey by J.D. Salinger
"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him." from All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
“But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.” from The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde