Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end.Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

-Bentham,Jeremy
Quoted in M St  J Packe The Life of  John Stuart Mill (1954), bk.1, ch.2.

   The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

-Bloom, Harold
  On the opening of ch.19 of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The Western Canon.

If ever I should condescend to prose, I'll write poetical commandments, which Shall supersede beyond all doubt all those That went before; in these I shall enrich My text with many things that no one knows, And carry precept to the highest pitch: I'll call the work 'Longinus o'er a Bottle, Or, Every Poet his own Aristotle'.

-Rochdale
^24  Don Juan, canto1, stanza 204.

Unkneaded dough-baked prose.

-Carew,Thomas
  'An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul's, Dr.  John Donne'.

Prose = words in their best order;öpoetry = the best words in the best order.

-Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
  Table Talk (published1835), entry for12  Jul.

: Madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? : Only with those in verse, Mr Witwoud. I never pin up my hair with prose.

-Congreve,William
  WITWOUDMILLAMANT1700  The Way of the World, act 2, sc.5.

Commitment seems to live more in the poetry of our aspirations than in the prose of the realities we have created.

-Cuomo, Mario Matthew
  In the NewYork Times,18 Nov.

They shut me up in Proseö As when a little girl They put me in the Closetö Because they liked me'still'.

-Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth
c.1862  Complete Poems, no.613 (first published1935).

   And this unpolished rugged verse I chose As fittest for discourse and nearest prose.

-Dryden,John
  Religio Laici, l.453^4.

What judgement I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as theyare, come crowding in so fast uponme, that myonlydifficulty isto choose or reject; to run them into verse or give them the other harmony of prose.

-Dryden,John
  Fables  Ancient and Modern, preface.

Those who talk of the Bible as a 'monument of English prose'are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Religion and Literature.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

-Forster, E(dward) M(organ)
  Howards End, ch.22.

Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

-Frye, Northrop
Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz,'The Literature Professors' Literature Professor', in TheMichigan Quarterly Review, Fall1978.

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

-Graves, Robert von Ranke
  On writing novels to support his love of writing poetry. In the NewYork Times,13  Jul.

   The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.

-Hemingway, Ernest Millar
  'Old Newsman Writes', in Esquire, Dec.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

-Hemingway, Ernest Millar
  Letter, 23  Jul.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

-Landor,Walter Savage
  Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans, 'Archdeacon Hare and Walter Landor'.

Gertrude Stein's prose song is a cold, black suet- pudding†of fabulously reptilian length.

-Lezama Lima,Jose¤
  Time and Western Man, pt.1, ch.13.

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

-Milton,John
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.1, l.15.

Par ma foi! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien! Good heavens! I've been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it!

-Molie'  re,Jean Baptiste Poquelin
  Le bourgeois gentilhomme, act 2, sc.4.