Quotes About Expression

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

Only humans can cry tears.

No, I do not like music. (But what she really was trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.)

i couldn't speak the language of his feelings

Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say...

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.

In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words I love you so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women said I love you without his ever speaking. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances.

Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum!

I thought maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own, she helped out at the store, then came home and sat in her big chair and stared at her magazines, not at them but through them, she let the dust accumulate on her shoulders.

creating a trail of things i wasn't able to tell you

Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is.

Writing is like pulling teeth out of your penis.

Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max's conduit wasn't bigger than anyone else's, it was simply unclogged. What

It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

It's just that sometimes we make things up just to talk

I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits....

I wanted to shout myself into his ear.

I couldn't tell what he was feeling, because I couldn't speak the language of his feelings.