Quotes About Expression

Actors are liars. Writers, too. The whole lot of them, even the horn players and the fortune-tellers and the freaks and the strongmen. Even the ladies with rings in their noses and high heels on their feet playing violins all along the Pier and the lie they are all singing and dancing and saying is We can get the old world back again .

I remember she sang the opening aria from Her Last Nocturne and I saw the night sky pour out of her mouth. Every time I wemt to hear her sing afterward, even months afterward, I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars flooding her mouth and splashing onto the boards in great gouts. Galaxies and the void dripping off her chin. Her teeth burning. I told her about it on a night in December and she whispered I know it, baby. I see it, too. That's my insides coming out.

Sometimes I am a cicada, hissing and singing in the leaves of a tree by the sunlit water, thoughtless and wordless, a voice that is all consonants and tribal clicks. Sometimes I rub my legs together like a string bass, and the lake quivers

When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist — could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it.

After so long keeping to herself and tending her secret quietly, all these words just bubbled up out of her her like cool golden champagne.

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself.

everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living.

In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is. It

Except that her joints ached and her head hurt and it tasted like a vorcha had shit in her mouth.

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

Coyness is what makes it art, darling. Otherwise … otherwise it's nothing but a funeral.

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You'll never wish you'd held back a little more.

We think . . . that girls ought to sing. They ought to sing, and dance while they're singing. But we are not girls, and so can be almost certain that we know nothing about the matter.

A house is a kind of box you put a girl in.

My old friends, you must help me! Tell me what it is that a girl does in the way that a spider weaves, so that Solace will not grow up to be the wrong sort of girl." We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.

but you can't forbid a word, so there.

I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.

Narrators may go where they please.

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.

Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn't call it a conversation.

He would say it all, except for the wishing she was a boy part, without crying or wobbling. The girls would look at him with such powerful love and gratitude that he would turn into a different person, a better person, the perfect person. All he needed was that one look and he could live forever.

My Daddy always said a lady's gotta sit still and hush her mouth except for please and thank you and you don't say. But it's not fair to do that to a girl. Talking is the most fun you can have. Clothes on, clothes off, it's everything in the world.

The kind of smile that has kept a froggy, dark sort of surprise in its back pocket, and won't spoil it too soon.

Ivan said, If only we could eat violin music.