Quotes About Expression

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

Without you I wouldn't have moved this way, to speak the language of flowers.

And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .

Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

V.V. sought to express something, which until expressed had only a twilight being (or even none at all--nothing but the illusion of the backward shadow of its imminent expression). It was Ada's castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterful or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time.

It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.

Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.

My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love.

The isms go, the ist dies, art remains

A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.

The mind writes with a pen, the heart, with a pencil.

If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

You have to be an artist and a madman...

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

I had always thought that wringing one's hands was a fictional gesture — the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture ("look, Lord, at these chains!") that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood.

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.