Quotes About Expression

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.

Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life—one scratched on the wall.

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement...

What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.

Nothing has really happened unless it's been described [in words].

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine.

Language is wine upon the lips.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.