Quotes About Expression

Do not think that just because I have the soul of a soldier, and cannot speak soft words, that it was not hard for me, or that because I left, I did not love.

It was as if, when her father spoke, her mother looked at him and saw a little goldfish, popping open his mouth over and over again but making no sound. And when her mother spoke, her father looked and saw a piranha doing the same thing.

How quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound.

I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.

But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else.

His expression became both very tender and very amused, as if there were an excellent inside joke between us, and he tilted his head to the right and looked at me with a focused kind of sweetness and warmth.

It's hard to imagine him angry without them. It must be like watching a game show by yourself, how calling out the answers feels silly and pointless. What is fury without witnesses? Where's the tension minus an audience to wonder what you'll do next?

I was me, Hillary, but I also was a vessel and a proxy.

If you were a writer, you could be impressive in a cerebral sort of way, but if you were a musician, you got to be viscerally magical.

But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting.

Dude, he said, Calm down. This was something I hated being told, especially by a boy. My voice might rise half an octave, I thought of telling him, but there's no need to take cover - I will not leap from my chair to embrace you, I will not even shriek with delight.

Both the lyrics and melody were straightforward, and though I wasn't knowledgeable about what was going on with his guitar, the other instruments, or the backup vocals, the song was pleasurable to listen to at the same time that it was devastatingly sad. Was Noah Brewster himself sad? With that hair and those big white teeth?

You don't need anyone else's approval or permission to enjoy the magic of writing.

The problem is that when I don't project my voice, the feedback is that I don't seem sufficiently tough. But when I do project it, the feedback is that I'm angry. I have a diagnosis, Nan had said. You're female

Just so I understand—" Noah Brewster said, and the confusion on his face made me wonder if he'd turn out to be one of the ding-dongs.

Really, we did not share a vocabulary that would allow for such a conversation; it was far too late to tell her anything.

What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.

To be a good writer, become a good listener.

He guessed he wouldn't mind being a book. Books just did what they were made to do, like stars just shining out in case anyone cared to look.

Griff had the guarded face of a man who had much to lose by the wrong choice, although he had never had anything to lose. Griff's smile visited his face like a stranger who was only asking directions on his way through to another town.

Ideas, he knew from experience, arrived in their own good time, dressed exactly the way they wanted to be and saying only as much as they felt like.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.