Quotes About Expression

Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you.

a great culture is recognizable through its artists and its saints and not by its GNP.

The only service you can render God is to give expression to what he is trying to give the world, through you. The only service you can render God is to make the very most of yourself in order that God may live in you to the utmost of your possibilities.

If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.

Fuck you, I said. Uh-oh. There's that angry word.

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness, the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. There's nothing to writing, the columnist Red Smith once commented. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

I didn't respond to him. Couldn't speak at all. Couldn't look at his self-mutilation--not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter's hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feelings in it either.

I love you was just three meaningless words without the actions that went with them

there was no shorthand for I'm sorry. You were obliged to speak those two words.

As my father talked, tears dripped down the side of his face like candle wax. The sight shocked me; until that moment, I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.

The hair on your head affects people and is a testament to the world about who you are. - Bonnie Foreshaw (Tabatha Rowley's story)

People are not like Tupperware, with their lids on securely.

If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.

La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorsol... The tongue has no bones but can break a man's back!

It's as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.

Don't write stories for teenagers or any other group," she advised. "Write them for yourself and let the audience that needs them find them.

If I talked, I might cry.

I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, 'Wake up!

That's often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other." "Like Van Gogh.

My art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

Your very flesh shall be a great poem...

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. [From the preface to Leaves Grass]

My words itch at your ears till you understand them

A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls.