Quotes About Expression

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.

I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul. Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's walls, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

The singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very life. They are not materials gathered from outside.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart . . .

In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.

The singer alone does not make a song, there has to be someone who hears. -Broken Song

I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free. But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.

The world loved man when he smiled. The world became afraid of him when he laughed.

The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song.

The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

I have read in books that we are called 'caged birds'. I cannot speak for others, but I had so much in this cage of mine that there was not room for it in the universe- at least that is what I then felt.

The song being great in its own wealth, why should it wait upon the words? Rather does it begin where mere words fail. Its power lies in the region of the inexpressible; it tells us what the words cannot.

The shore whispers to the sea: "Write to me what your waves struggle to say." The sea writes in foam again and again and wipes off the lines in a boisterous despair.

O woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their hearts. Poets are weaving for you a web with threads of golden imagery; painters are giving your form ever new immortality. The sea gives its pearls, the mines their gold, the summer gardens their flowers to deck you, to cover you, to make you more precious. The desire of men's hearts has shed its glory over your youth. You are one half woman and one half dream.

Clothed in facts truth feels oppressed. In the garb of poetry it moves easy and free.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for its entrance?

They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow. The dumb have a lonely grandeur like Nature's own. Wherefore

Our music draws the listener away, beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies to the root of the universe, while European music leads us to a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy.

THE fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing, But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

In Indian music, it is not possible to build anything other than the raga basis. We can run away from its fetters, but not from its main outline.

The singer alone does not make a song, there has to be someone who hears. One man opens his throat to sing, the other sings in his mind. Only when waves fall on the shore do they make a harmonious sound; Only when breezes shake the woods do we hear a rustling in the leaves. Only from a marriage of two forces does music arise in the world. Where there is no love, where listeners are dumb, there never can be song.

When we express our thought in words, the medium is not found easily. There must be a process of translation, which is often inexact, and then we fall into error. But