Quotes About Expression

Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there's so much... scratching on the matchbox

They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and then do what other people do when they have done it.

en tant que femme je n ai pas de pays. En tant que femme je ne désire aucun pays. Mon pays a moi, femme, c est le monde entier.

And thus she made it impossible for me to roll out my sonorous phrases about 'elemental feelings,' the 'common stuff of humanity,' 'depths of the human heart,' and all those other phrases which support us in our belief that, however clever we may be on top, we are very serious, very profound and very humane underneath.

She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own...

She had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.

Or was there always, he thought, as he too rose and looked for his hat, something that came to the surface, inappropriately, unexpectedly, from the depths of people, and made ordinary actions, ordinary words, expressive of the whole being …

Her eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself.

Y el poema me parece que sólo es tu voz hablando.

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but when communication is established they fall silent.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.

on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend, written around the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England...

and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, 'I love you,' or whether she said, 'I love the beech-trees,' or only 'I love—I love.

I will write, she had said, what I enjoy writing.

You must remember that fiction is the mirror of life.

Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut. This is exactly what I cannot do--

That wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.

it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels

There is little blood in my arm, Isabella repeated.

But because there is something that comes from outside and not from within I shall be forgotten; when my voice is silent you will not remember me, save as the echo of a voice that once wreathed the fruit into phrases.