Quotes About Expression

an untranslatable potpourri of grunts and monosyllables, punctuated only by Prophet's beautifully effusive smiles.

By not being able to tell me anything about themselves, they were telling me everything.

The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. Sorrow is admired only if it's done in silence.

La manière sudiste? dit-elle. - L'immortelle expression chère à ma mère. Nous rions quand la douleur se fait trop forte. Nous rions quand la pitié de l'humaine condition devient trop pitoyable. Nous rions quand il n'y a rien d'autre à faire.

It's dangerous to write about what you don't know, I said. Ledare got up to go and said, It's dangerous not to.

thought that, at birth, American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

not being able to tell me anything about themselves, they were telling me everything.

I realized that words were sometimes nothing more than notes you wrote to your deepest self as you fought to articulate the splendor and the magic and the ineluctable sense of loss that you felt in the swift, disturbing hours.

Winds shook me apart piecemeal, flung a bone here, a bone there. My eyes became snow, my hair turned to ice; I heard it chime against my shoulders like wind-blown glass. If I spoke, words would fall from me like snow, pour out of me like black wind.

A net of words, he said at last, is more powerful than a net of rope.

His face, at once beautiful and feral, revealed no more than the lion's face, which says nothing at all as the lion crouches and waits. It speaks only when it springs.

Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.

You look like her, in that dress," our father told me shyly, unaccustomed to complimenting me. He added, as I stepped on his foot, "You don't dance like her." "I haven't had her practice." I said amiably.

What you say, when you say a word. What you think when you say it. What I see and hear when you speak. Words are ancient; visions and echoes cling to them like barnacles on the whale's back. You speak words used in poetry and song since the beginning of the world we know. Here, you will learn to hear and to speak as if you had never listened, never spoken before. Then you will learn the thousand meanings within the word. What you say when you say fire.

You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.

We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them.

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.

All my life I've wanted to tell people I love them. Fear usually held me back, that they wouldn't care, or they wouldn't hear, or they would take too much from me once they knew.

Cryin' is good for the soul. Lets all that poison out of your system.

In my reading, I sought a contemporary, someone who lived what I thought of as my "other life," the one not lived, but so lavishly imagined and desired that it felt not like another life, but a version of my own. You feel—I did—deep contentment when you find such a life expressed by a writer who has lived it, as if in reading that life you (sort of) live it too.

in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of.

Carol looked at her. How do you become a poet? By feeling things - too much, I suppose, Therese answered conscientiously.

I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

I won't ever set the world on fire as a painter,' Dickie said, 'but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.