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Francine Prose QUOTES

Francine Prose QUOTES

1 " I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night. "

― Francine Prose , Goldengrove

2 " And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag til I saw him again. "

― Francine Prose , Goldengrove

3 " I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter. "

― Francine Prose , Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

4 " With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted. "

― Francine Prose , Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

5 " A neighbor once told me he had trouble with García Márquez’s novel because he likes to drink while he reads, and 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' gave him no space in which to take a sip of his beer. "

― Francine Prose , Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

6 " Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture. "

― Francine Prose , Goldengrove

7 " Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus. "

― Francine Prose , Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

8 " The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious. "

― Francine Prose , Goldengrove

9 " She emerges from the station directly across from the restaurant. And she's right on time. Like magic, Sonya thinks, briefly saddened to realize that this is what magic means now: not being late, not getting lost on the subway. Whatever happened to the fairy godmothers, to all those bunnies yanked out of hats? "

― Francine Prose

10 " But love is strange, as they used to say at the Chameleon Club. Even those of us who value intelligence over appearance have discovered, to our chagrin, that a high IQ doesn't necessarily translate into kindness or even conscience. "

― Francine Prose , Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

11 " Saying good-bye to a city is harder than breaking up with a lover. The grief and regret are more piercing because they are more complex and unmixed, changing from corner to corner, with each passing vista, each shift of the light. Breaking up with a city is unclouded by the suspicion that after the affair ends, you'll learn something about the beloved you wished you never knew. The city is as it will remain: gorgeous, unattainable, going on without you as if you'd never existed. What pain and longing the lover feels as he bids farewell to a tendril of ivy, a flower stall, the local butcher. The charming café where he meant to have coffee but never did. "

― Francine Prose

12 " Throughout her life, she behaved as if she had never heard anyone suggest that a woman couldn't do entirely as she pleased. "

― Francine Prose , The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired

13 " Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time. "

― Francine Prose , Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

14 " He claimed to be a Marxist, the only one of his claims I believed. He had that Marxist passion for oysters and good Sancerre, and that Marxist paralysis when the waiter brought the check. Already it’s obvious how much the Communists got wrong, overbetting on human high-mindedness, lowballing human desire. "

― Francine Prose , Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

15 " There's an exercise I'll do sometimes with a class in which we'll start with a word; I'll give everyone a word, and they'll write based on that word, and as they're writing I'll interrupt often and tell them to write more on the setting they're developing. I'll stop the process again and give intrusive instructions about developing the character in the setting, and on and on. The purpose of this is to allow the development of the fruit that is already in seedling form on the page. There can be an urge and an anxiety to skip ahead, to get to the action, to get to plot, or to go to the familiar. But plot is a process, and its beginnings can come from very subtle and unexpected places. Story movement and form are going to feel false if they do not happen from some kind of progression, even if (and this is important) the writer is not aware of this process in the moment, even if, as with the Nabokov excerpt, the events happen fast. (Aimee Bender, "On the Making of Orchards") "

― Francine Prose , The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House

16 " A few years ago, I listened to a rabbi give a talk and she was explaining what a blessing is. It is a naming of something, she said. What you are blessing already has to be latent in the person, otherwise it doesn't mean anything. But if it is (latent), and you bless what hasn't yet come forth - the fruit - it is a very powerful action. Think of your writing as bestowing a blessing. I'll leave you with that. (Aimee Bender, "On the Making of Orchards") "

― Francine Prose , The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House

17 " We weep for characters, and then we go brush our teeth and have to face the fact that the world is warming at such a rapid pace that a terrifying number of amphibians are vanishing every month. And so through plays, through soccer games, through novels, through movies, through video games, through political elections - through story - we rehearse feelings we might eventually need in our own lives. ... Through drama, in the moments of greatest suspense, when the hero is hanging by a support from above, swaying to and fro ... we rehearse anxiety and longing more profoundly than any other emotions. ... And longing is the reach, the extension, the wild desire to attain the next stable platform at the end of the high wire. It's the hope against hope that the water shooting out of the fountain will stay aloft forever. (Anthony Doerr, "The Sword of Damocles: On Suspense, Shower Murders, and Shooting People on the Beach") "

― Francine Prose , The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House

18 " People see everything through the lens of their obsessions. "

― Francine Prose , Goldengrove

19 " Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language. "

― Francine Prose , Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

20 " [Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. "

― Francine Prose , Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them