Quotes About Expression

His expression I remember from the first time I met him. Open, direct. But no longer anonymous. I know certain telling details now. Like he can't stand his brother and he gets one haircut a year. He likes Raymond Chandler and John Irving, Wallce Stegner and Joan Didion. That he loves the blues and songs that tell stories. Riding the ferries just to be on water. His favorite flavor is caramel.

you must remain limited by your experience, unless you turn to fiction, in which you can, of course, embrace people, places, and events you have never personally known.

Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing.

Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.

We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both "what" we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.

El género no es exactamente lo que uno «es» ni tampoco precisamente lo que uno «tiene». El género es el aparato a través del cual tiene lugar la producción y la normalización de lo masculino y lo femenino

You take the shit; you make an art of it; then, you die.

Poetry is not business as usual.

If books could kill, I would have written more of them before I died.

Unlike Maxine Kumin, I never learned to pay the syntax.

Did he happen to select a color too? Blue. Blue? Victoria burst out, prepared to do physical battle for white. Madame nodded, her finger thoughtfully pressed to her lips, her own hand plunked upon her waist. Yes, blue. Ice blue. He said you are glorious in that color-'a titian-haired angel,' he said Victoria abruptly decided ice blue was a lovely color to be married in.

For a man who's just inherited a small empire, Ian, you have a remarkably sour expression on your face. Would you care to join me for a drink and a few hands of cards, my lord?" An ironic smile twisted Ian's lips as he turned to acknowledge one of the few aristocrats he respected and regarded as a friend. "Certainly," he mocked. " Your Grace. " Jordan Townsende laughed. "It gets a little tedious, does it not?

Jenny gaped at the rather comic spectacle, unable to believe her own eyes until Friar Gregory was so close she could actually see the stricken expression on his face. Rounding on her husband, sputtering in her furious indignation, she burst out, You—you madman! You've stolen a priest this time! You've actually done it! You've stolen a priest right out of a holy priory!

I love you, he thought with each thrust of his body; I love you, his heart shouted with each thunderous beat; I love you, his soul cried out as Alexandra's spasms clenched him tightly. I love you. The words exploded in his being as he drove into her one last time and poured his life, his future, and all the disillusionment of his past into her tender keeping.

Love this quotation I just read: "Ciao," the girl said. Fuck you, ciao. Ciao was the way Katherine and her friends said good-bye and it always struck her as a perfect symbol of their attempts to be what they weren't.

In real life, as I mentioned in the first chapter, people don't try to have feelings, and frequently they try not to have them.

Why are we acting as if we're angry. Are we angry?

Understand that you're sensitive." Miri was proud for coming up with such a good word. "Is that like saying I'm dramatic, or crazy?" Miri was careful now. "Sensitive is better than dramatic, and it's definitely not as bad as crazy.

In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced--writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices--all because of fear. How many have resorted to self-censorship? How many are saying to themselves, Nope ... can't write about that. Can't teach that book. Can't have that book in our collection. Can't let my student write that editorial in the school paper.

I can't think when you're in here, he said. What do you have to think about? Making!

What I worry about most is the loss to young people. If no one speaks out for them, if they don't speak out for themselves, all they'll get for required reading will be the most bland books available. And instead of finding the information they need at the library, instead of finding the novels that illuminate life, they will find only those materials to which nobody could possibly object.

because everyone knew you knitted argyle socks only for a boyfriend.

That's not a bad word . . . hate and war are bad words but fuck isn't.

That's not a bad word... hate and war are bad words, but fuck isn't.