Quotes About Expression

Love, compassion, kindness, and generosity change their function from being motivations for practice to becoming expressions of realization.

in art, we do not run to keep up with random moments, we select & create the moment occurring forever:

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognized by burning. from A Poem is a Walk, Epoch 18 (Fall 1968): 114-19.

You'd look beautiful in a feedbag dress tied in the middle with a rope.

In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.

The theater has been called the pulse of the people.

Deliver me from your cold phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands.

Most women are frequently labelled "insane" for expressing their misery and failing to act positive. It is form of misogynistic abuse that is also about pushing women towards the doctor's room, the therapists couch, and the chemist.

The way black women say girl can be magical. Frankly, I have no solid beliefs about the survival of consciousness after physical death. But if it's going to happen I know what I want to see after my trek toward the light. I want to see a black woman who will smile and say, Girl....

drip and fling and pour color onto the glass. Then I push the paint around. You have to have some faith. If it looks like nothing, if you think you've destroyed what might have been a good painting, keep at it. If you've scraped all but a few streaks away, chances are those streaks will suggest something else. Don't give up. Don't be afraid of the mess.

THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN WHO HAD ARRIVED AT the Northeast Center angry and belligerent, as inclined to take a swing at you as not. He began showing up in Bill's studio and started to paint. Bill watched him become an artist, and gradually he stopped being at the mercy of his rages. He got well enough to leave the center and move to a group home. This is what he said to Bill before he left: "What is art, anyway, except not pounding on walls.

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

What is art, anyway, except not pounding on walls.

Usually we regard as meaningful that which can be expressed, and as meaningless that which cannot be expressed. Yet, the equation of the meaningful and the expressible ignores a vast realm of human experience, and is refuted by our sense of the ineffable which is an awareness of an allusiveness to meaning without the ability to express it.

Above all, remember that the meaning of life is to live as if it were a work of art. You're not a machine. When you're young, start working on this great work of art called your own existence.

Above all, remember that the meaning of life is to live it as if it were a work of art. You're not a machine. When you're young, start working on this great work of art called your own existence.

Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.

to employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change.

to the Bible the idea of the good is penultimate; it cannot exist without the holy. The holy is the essence, the good is its expression.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.

Writing is the great invention of the world.

The inclination to share thoughts with one another is probably an original impulse of our nature.If in pain I wish to let you know it,and ask your sympathy and assistance;and my pleasurable emotions also,I wish to communicate to,and share with you.

How weak and fruitless must be any word of mine.