Make your words linger long after the last page. Discover the power of quotable prose.
By Banele Ndlovu
My history with quotes
For most of my childhood, the only reading I did of my own volition was of the humour section at the back of Drum magazine. I would sit for hours with a pen in hand and a piece of paper, writing down all the best quips from my aunt’s collection of magazines. I committed as many as I could to memory and recited them to my friends at school the following day.
I hated reading anything else. My teachers were merely the first in a line of many who had the unfortunate task of ‘encouraging me to read’. While I wasn’t a big fan of the reading lists, I enjoyed it when my friends and I, in a heated debate about all things under the sun, would recall lines from the books to prove our points.
My love for quotes didn’t end there. I had my first phone in my teens: the Motorola V360. It doubled as a typewriter. I became the kind of kid the meme ‘I’m 14, and this is deep’ is about. I collected and reread all the wittiest and most beautiful quotes I could find and started learning to write some of my own. This practice taught me a few things about writing.
Five things I learnt from practising quotable prose
- Caring about the fundamentals of writing. People don’t quote clunky, grammatically incorrect passages. They quote passages that are clear and concise.
- Writing with conviction and authority. The best quotes are those that do not second-guess themselves. They avoid words like ‘I think’, ‘in my opinion’, ‘probably’, ‘generally’, etc. They say what they want to say and let those who disagree, disagree.
- Writing melodically and memorably. The sound and aesthetic of a paragraph or sentence matter just as much as what it is attempting to argue. ‘I can think, and this means that I’m alive’ does not have the kind of success that ‘I think, therefore I am’ has.
- Offering something deeply insightful and exciting to readers on every page. As writers, we can be too fixated on producing meaningful and exciting books and neglect the opportunity to produce meaningful and exciting passages along the way. In his article encouraging slow and intentional reading, pastor and theologian John Piper writes, ‘Books don’t change people, paragraphs do – sometimes sentences.’ His observation is a sober reminder to both the reader and the writer that a great book is an anthology of great sentences.
- Completing stand-alone thoughts. In his article on the subject, author and editor Ross McCammon highlights the importance of ‘autonomous ideas that don’t require context’. Contrasting the quotable sentence, ‘Usefulness is an underrated quality in writing,’ with the not-so-quotable, ‘It is an underrated quality in writing,’ he warns writers to watch out for words like ‘it’, which, as demonstrated, hinder quotability.
READ MORE:
- Five Pointers for Writing a Perfect Paragraph for a Magazine Article by Maseeeng Papashane
- Use Simple Sentences by Roline Galvan
- Words Like Butterflies by Leanne Johnson.
The greats are quotable
The people we find on the ‘most-quoted-people list’ are either people who have one great, very recognisable quote, or too many to count. As a writer, I am more fascinated by the latter group. A person might get lucky and say one right thing in the right way and be quoted for generations to follow, but Shakespeare, Wilde, Gandhi, Einstein, Emerson, Churchill, Austen and Nietzsche mastered the art of writing quotable prose. They were great writers who consistently produced passages that readers could commit to memory and live their lives by.
Quotability and the writer’s immortality
Lastly – and this is to appeal to our vanity as writers (if I haven’t been doing that already) – it should be no secret that there is something in us that kicks against death. Something in us wants to keep speaking long after we’re buried. Writing a great book or article is one way of doing this, and writing quotable prose is another. In fact, there is no difference between the two. To borrow from Piper’s article again, in every great piece of writing there should be paragraphs or sentences that ‘lodge themselves so powerfully’ in the readers’ minds ‘that [their] effect is enormous when all else is forgotten’.
About the Author
Banele Ndlovu is a writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He works for a Christian ministry, translating and editing books. Besides reading and writing, he enjoys watching movies, listening to music, and going for a jog.
