Quotes About Expression

You and I, we're no good at telling a story straight. It won't come off right. Like a dog reciting a sonnet. Impressive, but how much better to let him howl?

These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.

Cocky don't say anything and that's as good as love right about now.

Butterfield Blues Band, Vanilla Fudge...

Word retrieval emergency

Expressive arts therapy--the purposeful application of art, music, dance/movement, dramatic enactment, creative writing, and imaginative play--is a non-verbal way of self-expression of feelings and perceptions. More importantly, they are action-oriented and tap implicit, embodied experiences of trauma that can defy expression through verbal therapy or logic.

Humans have historically used the arts in integrative ways, particularly within the contexts of enactment, ceremony, performance, and ritual.

What would Jesus do with this gift of writing, this God-given love of writing? What would He write?

Imagine my surprise when, after a lifetime of teaching me to keep personal things to myself, Mom insisted my drawings were the start of a comic strip for millions of people to enjoy.

Makeup is such a weird concept. I'll wake up in the morning and look in the mirror: "Gee, I really don't look so good. Maybe if my eyelids were blue, I'd be more attractive."

You will usually discover that the creative process itself is truly the most healing part of any art therapy experience.

In order to express the reality of my past, I would have to reach a public whose point of reference was deliberately distorted through social engineering.

The problem with silence is that it can't speak up and say why it's silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.

minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.

Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

Because minor feelings are ongoing, they lend themselves more readily to forms and genres that are themselves serial, such as the graphic novel (the Hernandez Brothers, Adrian Tomine) or the serial poem (Wanda Coleman, Solmaz Sharif, Tommy Pico) or the episodic poetic essay (Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine), but also, and more increasingly, are seen in literary fiction (Paul Beatty, Ling Ma).

In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it the way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet.

I always thought my physical identity was the problem, but writing made me realize that even without myself present, I still couldn't rise above myself, which pitched me into a kind of despair.

When I made art alone, it was a fantasy, but shared with Erin and Helen, art became a mission.

Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry.

My uncle said he used to start and end all his sentences with "motherfucker" because he learned his English from his black customers when he was a clothing wholesaler in New York.

stay in your lane" politics in which artists and writers are asked to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences. Such a politics not only assumes racial identity is pure—while ignoring the messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap—but reduces racial identity to intellectual property.

He got rid of the punchline to prove that stand-up could be anything, which is what geniuses do: they blow up mothballed conventions in their chosen genre and show you how a song, or a poem, or a sculpture, can take any form.

In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feeling: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.