Pause & Prose
On Google Play
Read one great line of literature before a distracting app opens.
Choose the apps that tend to swallow your evening. When you open one, Pause & Prose stops it and gives you something worth reading first — a line from Austen or Dickinson, Marcus Aurelius or Oscar Wilde. Read it, tap Continue, and the app opens. That is the whole idea.
No leaderboards. No shaming. Nothing to sign up for.
How it works
- Choose the apps that pull at you. The ones you open without deciding to.
- One of them opens, and a line arrives first. It is on the screen the instant the screen is — nothing is fetched from anywhere.
- Read it, and carry on. Tap Continue and the app you reached for opens. Pause & Prose steps out of the way.
You set the pace
What is inside
- 1,117 lines, from 348 authors. Everything on your shelves comes round once before anything repeats. Ten complete works are in there too, a passage at a time — Meditations, the Tao Te Ching, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Leaves of Grass.
- Lines to keep. Tap the heart and a line waits for you in Favourites. Add your own, too: type it, speak it, or photograph the page.
- All of it on your phone. The whole collection is built into the app, so a pause opens instantly and works with no signal at all. Nothing you write leaves your phone unless you share it.
- Built to be read. Large type from the start, warm paper, and body text held to WCAG AAA contrast — and tested for it.
About the writing
How dreary to be somebody!
Emily Dickinson, Poems
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Every line comes from a public-domain original, and the standard for including one is strict: out of copyright in the United States, by an author who died more than seventy years ago, and traceable to a real page. The English is a public-domain translation, or our own.
The lines everyone misattributes — to Eliot, to Twain, to Wilde — are left out on purpose.
The price
Try it free, then keep it with a single payment — $4.99 in the US, £4.39 in the UK, and Google Play shows you your own local price before you decide. No subscription, no ads, nothing to sign up for.
Android 8.0 and above.