Quotes About Expression

Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what's important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us.

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives.

To be alive: not just the carcass / But the spark. That's crudely put, but... If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they're both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them.

The way the word sinks into the deep snow of the page

If shadows could talk they would tell us everything we know already but in the melodious language of tears in which every third word rhymes. from "Some Notes on Shadows

A French writer once said that prose is walking, poetry is dancing. That's a fine metaphor for the pleasurable intensification of emotion, language, and rhythm that is at the heart of poetry.

If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language.

William Butler Yeats was after the same point when he remarked: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

They said "whar" for where, "thar "for there, "critter" for creature, "nekkid" for naked, "wider" for widow, and "younguns" for young ones. They were always "fixin" to do something, or go "sparkin" instead of courting, and the younguns "growed up" instead of grew up. Children were referred to as "little shits".

Bad art, for Niemeyer, was not just that which promotes immorality, but, in an even deeper sense, promotes unreality—the fantasy that leaves us locked in private purgatories.

It was the invention in the music that was so striking —the will to create what had never been heard before, through vocal tricks, rhythmic shifts, pieces of sound that didn't logically follow one from the other, that didn't make musical or even emotional sense when looked at as pieces, but as a whole spoke a new language.

The only thing that rock & roll did not get from country and blues was a sense of consequences," the writer Bill Flanagan said to Neil Young in 1986.

Johnson remains the most emotionally committed of all blues singers;

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

Art doesn't explain itself.

critic Robert Ray once said, "What's interesting about rock & roll is that the truly radical aspect occurs at the level of sound. 'Tutti Frutti' is far more radical than Lennon's 'Woman Is the Nigger of the World,' and the sound of Bob Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did.

Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger—which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you.

Listening to a song] one could experience a freedom from one's physical body, and from one's social body - the mask you wore to go about in public among those who thought they knew you, an unchosen mask of nervousness and tradition, the mask that, when owrn too long, makes the face behind it shrivel up and rot away. For some, a spinning record opened up the possibility that one might say anything, in any voice, with any face, the singer's mask now a sign of mystery.

Some forms of music spark the freedom of singers to say, in words or how words are sung, in pace, hesitation, timbre, shouts, or silences, what they most deeply and desperately want to say; other forms take it away.

I was serious about ballet for a long time, but my mom got me into tap and jazz and modern and hip-hop, and I was one of those over-lessoned children.

Studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn't relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

If my love to you can't be said in a posy, it can't be said in a library.

Shakespearean tragedy is neither ancient history nor fairy tale. Perhaps to express this is the most important thing. In which period does the action of the play take place? It is in that past which can become the future.