Quotes About Expression

know that expression—only a man could cause a woman to look like that

And so another storyteller fell asleep that night thinking not of the telling of the story but of the possibilities inherent in color and texture

that's why I came back to art, after the war—it's a license to be a bit strange, after all; I sometimes think people expect it, so the fact that I am different doesn't matter.

Thus he always wrote using a pencil with a long, sharp but soft lead, so he couldn't here his words as they formed on the page.

They say the face tells all there is to know about a life, but I personally believe much can be deduced from the hands. There are lines and scars, bumps and calluses; indeed, the hands are both the sketch and the final work of art.

But on paper, things can live forever. On paper, a butterfly never dies.

How can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, I breathe them in and let them out over and over again.

I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them then blow gently, watch them float right out of my hands.

We hear them continually on TV: hence they occur first when it is our turn to talk. In this regard, talk may be said to be the enemy of writing. If you observe yourself when on the point of writing that the word rising spontaneously to your mind is not the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech, but this mush of counterfeits and cliches.

The beloved's features too were standardized in certain adjectives of color and shape and likened to natural objects, fruit and flowers especially. As a result, ingenuity in finding fresh ways to follow the pattern was required in addition to actual poetic powers. The challenge was great and it accounts for the quantity of verbal lovemaking in the blue, addressed to the remote or non-existent tribes of Celias and Delias.

What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.

I submit that style, too, is an answer to a common want; but not so much to formulated problems as to felt difficulties of an emotional kind. . . . Style is fundamentally a pose, a stance, at times a self delusion, by which the people of any period meet the particular dilemmas of their day.

That which I call a text is practically everything… Speech is a text, gesture is a text, reality is a text in this new sense. This is not about re-establishing graphocentrism alongside logocentrism or phonocentrism or text-centrism. The text is not a centre. The text is an openness without borders, of ever-differentiating references.

Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.

Speech frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much.

ELLE NE PARLE PAS L'INNOMMÉE OR TU L'ENTENDS MIEUX QUE MOI AVANT MOI EN CE MOMENT MÊME

One can, of course, speak several languages. There are speakers who are competent in more than one language. Some even write several languages at a time (prostheses, grafts, translation, transposition) . But do they not always do it with a view to an absolute idiom? and in the promise of a still unheard-of language? of a sole poem previously inaudible?

Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object.—J.-J. Rousseau, Fragment inédit d'un essai sur les langues

I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.

Yo creía que quería ser poeta, pero en el fondo quería ser poema

Preguntarme por qué no escribo inevitablemente desemboca en otra inquisición mucho más azorante: ¿por qué escribí? Al fin y al cabo, lo normal es leer

Qué es el silencio? El silencio son seis cuerdas sin guitarra.

To find an animal body within himself Hawkins tells me, he had to abandon narrative dancing.

her music; its unmatched poetic shape and impact, which, like metaphor in language, breaks out of its own restrictions and — with vast imaginal inference and resonance — expresses for us things yet unknown.