"What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is..." - Quote by Mark Twain
What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.
More by Mark Twain
“To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology.”
“Heroine: Girl in a book who is saved from drowning by a hero and marries him next week, but if it was to be over again ten years later it is likely she would rather have a life-belt and he would rather have her have it. Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.”
“I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.”
More on Writing
“An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.”
“The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”
“It was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line.”
More on Poetry
“Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades!Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,--Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!”
“Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.”
“I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.”