Quotes About Expression

I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I'd cried all I could and it wasn't enough.

I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.

but for poetry one needs one's native tongue. The voice of the soul is not so easily translated.

The ridiculous way we thought male, female, as pants or skirt. Suddenly, the whole sexual universe and its conventions seemed fantastic, contrived.

She laughed so easily, when she was happy, but also when she was sad.

My words, that's what she wanted. What's this? she kept asking. What's this? But how could I tell her? She'd taken all the words.

You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.

Solo perchè un poeta dice qualcosa non significa che sia vero, ma solo che suona bene.

What if he…" But I didn't want to say die…dying was a matter for professionals, not poets.

Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement.

Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

Do go on," I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.

Are you gay?' Paul Trout asked me. I shrugged. Maybe that would be better. I thought back to how I felt when Olivia danced with me, and the time Claire kissed me on the lips. I didn't know. People just wanted to be loved. That was the things about words, they were clear and specific -- chair, eye, stone -- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings.

And it occurred to Josie how tortured Michael must have been by the way his mother's gift just flowed out of her, so clear and certain and unobstructed, like a spring. How painful it must have been for him to watch this. Michael had that genius, maybe even more than Meredith, but couldn't let it out like that. Just pour it out. And no matter how good he was, even if he was the one picked out of a whole show, he could never feel it. He could do everything except find a way to satisfaction.

All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..

What, in all the world , could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.

there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

Theory and interpretation, far from threatening works of art, keep them alive.

Nobody can tell you how the blues feel unless they have the blues. We all take it differently.

I love making music. That's what I love to do. So I don't feel like there's any need to take a break unless I want to.

I'm creative. I can't relax unless I've got some project on the go. I'm somebody from art school, and art school during the punk era, when you just had a go at whatever came along.