Quotes About Expression

To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God's love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It's taking flesh and turning it back into words.

It's as if Thomas Kinkade and Dante were at a party, and one turned to the other sometime after midnight and uttered that classic line You know, we really should work together sometime...

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.

People wrote these stories down because they found in them something that helped restore their dignity; the stories gave them a sense of identity; they helped give voice to their pain.

The Psalms show us what healthy spiritual life looks like. You name everything that's happening inside of you. You give it language and expression, You articulate exactly what the desolation feels like. If you don't drag it up and give it words, then it's buried down in your being somewhere. And it will come out in other ways. Unhealthy, destructive ways. You'll keep it bottled up. And you'll be miserable.

It is possible for music to be labeled Christian and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled cliches. That Christian band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren't a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a Christian movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft.

Because sometimes you need a biologist, and sometimes you need a poet. Sometimes you need a scientist, and sometimes you need a song.

What you do with your life is fundamentally creative work. The kind of life you lead, what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it's all part of how you create your life.

The world is free to be a world. It's free to be beautiful and safe, and it's free to break your heart in a thousand ways. That free.

All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world. There's

Connection is an engine of creation.

may have been done or said by someone else. That's a distinct possibility. It may have been done or said before. But it hasn't been done or said by you. It hasn't come through your unique flesh and blood, through your life, through your experience and insight and perspective.

He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called "Christianity.

I didn't think of myself as American or German, but as a little of both. I didn't speak only German or only English, but used whatever words worked best for the situation.

Munrow hated hearing pre-Romantic music sung with operatic vibrato, for example, and pioneered the use of vocalists whose voices didn't wobble.

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

I know why we laugh. We laugh because it hurts, and it's the only thing to make it stop hurting.

Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.

Women talk when they want to. Or don't.

The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

Anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly.

My vocal cords lived their own life, wild and free.