Quotes About Expression

Life's a show and we all play a part And when the music starts We open up our hearts

Writing is the greatest thing that can happen to a human being. It's the best.

I myself have never enjoyed anything more than writing. I love to live in that world.

The English Language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever.

I'm sorry. But it's like you said, Emma...I don't have any claws.

The greatest expression of rebellion is joy.

I write to give myself a strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

Sometimes you might say something you think is true.

Alive. This music rocks me. I drive the interstate, watch faces come and go on either side. I am free to be sung to; I am free to sing. This woman can cross any line.

In a way, we [poets] are listeners. I go to poetry because I don't have the words." —

No. I was not okay. And neither was James Baldwin though his essays Were perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight To assert humanness in a black and white world.

The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen.

Until the passage of the Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, it was illegal for Native citizens to practice our cultures. This included the making and sharing of songs and stories. Songs and stories in one culture are poetry and prose in another. They are intrinsic to cultural sovereignty. To write or create as a Native person was essentially illegal.

It was impossible to make it through the tragedy Without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?

I had come this far without the elegance of speech. ... I could not speak coherently. I stuttered in my mind. I could not express my perception of the sacred. I could speak everyday language: Please pass the salt. I would like . . . When are we going . . . I'll meet you there. I wanted the intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors to pass through my language, my life.

Every collection of poetry makes a force field of energy. When creating you give yourself over to it. In the fiercest moments of imagination the artist may not know where they are going, the how and when of it, and it doesn't matter. What matters is the process regenerates and meaning shifts at every turn.

We must take care to feed the minds, hearts, and spirits of those coming up behind us--to offer songs, poems, and stories that will break open that which is hardened, expose that which is evil-minded or would harm, and remind us how we are constructed to bring forth beauty of thought and beingness.

I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. The mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories.

I began to understand that poetry did not have to be ... of an English that was always lonesome for its homeland in Europe.

We make ceremony with words even as our words can lead us to the hells of destruction.

Each collection of poetry makes a force field of energy.

The question that comes up when you write about trauma is, are you retraumatizing? Are you retraumatizing by writing about trauma? That's a good question. I remember the writer, poet Meridel Le Sueur, social activist in the '30, calling to tell me when I was a young woman, she said: "I wrote so beautifully about terrible things that happened. And was I wrong to do that?

I study and read poems and try to put myself in them.

But your half-grin is the only image that comes clear. All the words lead to that