A Quote by William Strunk, Jr.

Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.

William Strunk, Jr.

Quote Topics

Digest Generally Hard Prose Rich Sometimes

Quote Author

William Strunk, Jr.
American - Writer
July 1, 1869 - September 26, 1946

When I'm describing wartime activities or violence I don't want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture. Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.

Chang-Rae Lee

I think of being ornate as a Victorian quality, little to do with Shakespeare. But even Dickens wasn't ornate; he wrote with flow and naturalism.

Christopher Plummer

Blood may be thicker than water, but it is still sticky, unpleasant and generally nauseating.

Janeane Garofalo

If you ask any of the other actors, they'd probably say nice things because they're nice people, but I was always like, "Oh gosh, I hope I'm doing this right." I was very hard on myself, and I continue to be. That's why it's sometimes hard for me to digest watching myself on television. There is some pressure.

Steven Yeun

Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing more.

James Kenneth Stephen

Business and politics have a wholesome and an unwholesome interface. You have to eliminate the unwholesome interface.

Salman Khurshid

I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.

Pattiann Rogers

When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.

Jeffrey Rosen

For me, hearing my voice is sometimes a little nauseating, especially at Christmas.

Johnny Mathis

Certainly for me prose has a dilatory capacity, insofar as I don't trust my abilities in prose. I imagine I could have done the same thing in poetry, but sometimes I feel more fluent in poetry than in prose, and as a consequence perhaps I might pass too quickly by a thing that I might, in prose, have struggled merely to articulate. That struggle creates space, and it seems to me a particular kind of space into which memory flows easily. I suspect I think better in poetry, however.

Shane McCrae

I met Kim Kardashian the other week, and she knew who I was! I walked in the room, and she was like, 'I should text Kanye saying you're here; he showed me your music.' It's really hard to digest. Also, I don't think you should digest stuff like that.

Sam Smith

I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.

Laura van den Berg

When you sit players in front of doctors and surgeons, they use big, fancy words, and sometimes players get lost. It's hard to digest. But when you've been there and you can break it down into 'football language,' they can understand it better.

Harry Kewell

Tallulah [Bankhead] was the foremost naughty girl of her era but, in those days, "naughty" meant piquant, whereas values have so changed that now, in the 1970s, it generally means nauseating.

Anita Loos

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.