Quotes About Expression

The grey steel streets were indeed paltry (not our feelings, and no, not the blues) but those gray streets were dead and cold, despite our warm living selves celebrating the life in us dancing across their surfaces.

Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.

You will write … if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting.

Somewhere along the line I also recognized that spiritual growth is "inner" creativity, as contrasted to creativity in the arts and the sciences, which is "outer" creativity.

Your thoughts are your message to the world. Just as the rays are the messages of the Sun.

It's tiring to carry the weight of eternally unsaid words.

Charientism (n.) A rhetorical term to describe saying a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way. If I knew how to say disagreeable things in an agreeable fashion I most likely would not be spending most of my time siting alone in a room, reading the dictionary.

Along with tableity (the condition of being a table) and paneity (the state of being bread), cellarhood is a wonderful example of the spectacular ways English has of describing things that no ever thinks it necessary to describe.

Vocabularian (n.) One who pays too much attention to words. In the past I have been accused by various parties of paying too much attention to words. Which is true, I suppose; but what else do I have to pay attention to? Vomiturient

Anglo-Saxon tends not to lend itself to long and elaborate words that have strung together three or four affixes to create a rhetorical term for a very obscure thing. While

The first recorded use to date of OMG is from 1917, and reads in full "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!" The citation comes from a letter by one John Arbuthnot Fisher, who happens to have been the admiral in charge of the British navy (a position known as first sea lord), and was written to Winston Churchill, staunch defender of both the English people and their language.

All of the human emotions and experiences are right there in this dictionary, just as they would be in any fine work of literature. They just happen to be alphabetized.

Sesquihoral (adj.) Lasting an hour and a half. Because sometimes you just don't feel like saying "an hour and a half." Short-thinker

The Verbalist, 1894

Among people who might be described as having at least a passing regard for the English language, there are few instances of usage that evoke a desire to mutilate more than the perceived misuse of literally.

Or we reference Winston Churchill, who was famously reported to have written "This is the kind of tedious/arrant nonsense up with which I will not put," in response to an overweening staffer having removed a preposition from some of his writing. (However, as with many quotes that are purported to have originated with the former prime minister of Great Britain, the author was someone other than Churchill).*

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression

The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.

Warish Shah I call out to you, Rise from your grave, speak out and turn, Another page of the Book of Love

I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

Dialogue is not conversation. It is conversation's greatest hits.

Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can't make friends with grief, you've got to at least make way for it.

The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say.