Quotes About Expression

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed

David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.

racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon

Rumsey closed with an appeal for nurturing the artistic temperament in young and old alike, "to stoke that Apollonian ember in all mortal beings.

Cora hoped the musicians wouldn't think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

memory has a palette and broad brush.

I had a roll of non sequiturs in my pockets and I was just tossing them out across the water trying to get a good skip going.

Raymond shared theirs—and the

I lit fires because I didn't know back then it was enough to see it in my head," Zippo said. "I didn't have to do it. That's why people dig my boudoir photographs. Seeing it can be the same thing as doing it.

Most people say, "Show, don't tell," but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

Be kind to everybody. Make art. Fight the power.

Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel not so terrible about my various emotional issues.

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all at once, twice, three times.

If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.

Literature can remind us that not all ife is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

How very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.

There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock - perhaps I must tell it before it is forgotten or becomes like everything else, something else.

For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.

You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!

It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences.