Quotes About Expression

Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.

David Morris, in The Evil Hours, his remarkable book on trauma, notes, "Part of trauma's corrosive power lies in its ability to destroy narrative, and . . . stories, written and spoken, have tremendous healing power for both the teller and the listener.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

What's the matter with manhood? There's something about how masculinity is imagined, about what's praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed.

If you lack words for a phenomenon, an emotion, a situation, you can't talk about it, which means that you can't come together to address it, let alone change it.

By now you've noticed that Woolf says "I don't know" quite a lot.

the language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech, to scare them into shutting up.

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...

Es la arrogancia lo que lo hace difícil, en ocasiones, para cualquier mujer en cualquier campo; es la que mantiene a las mujeres alejadas de expresar lo que piensan y de ser escuchadas cuando se atreven a hacerlo; la que sumerge en el silencio a las mujeres jóvenes indicándoles, de la misma manera que lo hace el acoso callejero, que este no es su mundo.

Woolf liberates the text, the imagination, the fictional character, and then demands that liberty for ourselves, most particularly for women.

our interrogation of Woolf's reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, "Fuck this shit," which carried the same general message, and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas, and we were discussing Woolf because of the latter.

True love is not a crock, but patriotism is.

She leaned down and smelled the skin at Connor's shoulders right at the spots where, as Martha Graham might have said, his own wings might have been attached.

I shake so hard that freckles jump off my face.

all these other little ringlet-headed girls and break into a dance. Make everyone look at me, only me! But you have to stand in line. All we're supposed to do is stand up here and

when we done went and ripped all the gold HIS monograms off the anniversary towels and writ SHITHEAD on them with magic markers.

sadness we did not have to work on. It came, as sadness usually does, as soon as I sat down and began to listen. The small press had a correspondingly

There was also a daughter, very short, very plump, very gay, an amazing production for the Gregorievitches. It was as if two very serious authors had set out to collaborate and then had published a limerick.

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

she repaid us by giving life the quality that but for her was only to be found in music

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence

That shows how impossible it is to be a woman. One's whole life depends on one's looks but one mayn't speak of one's own beauty

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

We might use or read or hear the same word twice, but we can't step into precisely the same thought a second time...Language is at the surface of the much deeper flow of our riverine minds.