prose

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.

He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same

Because even when there is no hope, somehow you can still find a place to pin inside the things that you need.

You take what you can get, I reckon. You take what you can get.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Later when they would mention, they would say, and everyone would know, but not nearly as well as they meant.

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.

I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

I__ a man of music as much as I am a man of words and prose. One could even possibly say that they, music and prose, are connected to a lengthy and mutually beneficial extent and that they have been of centuries or millenniums.

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.

Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.

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.

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old.Not young.But a viable die-able age.

Despite my affection for subtext and plot and prose at its best... life, it turns out, is nothing more than the finer details.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can__ pick up a page. All the words slide off.