Quotes About Expression

I thought I'd try to write her a life

Moins j'ouvrirai la bouche, moins je ferai figure odieuse et cynique.

Music begins where the possibilities of language end

The sensuality of desperate lives. Only poets talk like that. But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does it bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.

But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does is bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.

Yet I understood the poetry of such mind games one day when, attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

I don't know how to answer. I know what to think, but words in the head are like voices under water. They are distorted.

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise than how should I call it love?