Quotes About Expression

but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.

She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.

Because the opposite of fascism isn't anarchy, it's theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down.

Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.

Breaking things heals a great many hurts. This is why children do it so often.

her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.

Clothes are a story you choose to tell about yourself, a different one every day.

Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls or a Scarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs.

She who invented words, and yet does not speak; she who brings dreams and visions, yet does not sleep; she who swallows the storm, yet knows nothing of rain or wind. I speak for her; I am her own.

What was a person, if not the things they knew and the face they wore?

Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either.

Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it's monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?

When you don't need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That's the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are.

Imagine having so much energy to spare after finding food and shelter and clothing and some tiny goddamn scrap of company that you figured you'd make a beautiful silver cup, not because some kid did the best job, but just because she tried the hardest. I tried the hardest all the time , and everyone's just permanently fucking mad at me. Imagine having that much left over that you give one single ghostly shit about the eight-best daffodil.

We've made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant.

Falling in love is embarrassing. It is not hardcore. It is not part of the scene.

A tongue is very like a gun, which is why they nearly rhyme. Both can be fired to devastating effect, for good or evil, and both can explode in your hands, wounding your comrades instead of your enemies.

I can't even say her name. She doesn't even have a name. She is she . She is her . She possesses the pronoun so completely that no one else can touch it. There is only one her in the great stinking gas giant of my heart, fifty feet high. She is a giantess. I am no one. Well, not "no one". I am Anchises St. John. But I am no one's him .

September laughed and her laugh sounded like a roar; as if she had never been able to properly laugh in her whole life, only giggle or chuckle or grin, and now that she could do it right, now that her laughing had grown up and put bells on, it had become the most boisterous, rowdy roar you ever heard.

Is there anything which does not do as you say?" the girl asked archly. He blushed. "You know my cry. I do not know yours," he mumbled, not meeting her gaze.

And honey, everybody eats art and drinks stories. It's the best drunk there is!

no one says a word that has not been spoken a thousand times before, a thousand thousand times, and even the first of those was a repetition of words that came before.

Because the opposite of fascism isn't anarchy, it's theater.