Quotes About Expression

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

I am civilised. My feelings are not.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about being happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is when I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

There are voices and they must be heard.

I wrote my way out.

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence.

I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

It's the clichés that cause the trouble.

Human beings often display emotions they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not display.

Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.

The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language.

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous

Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.

What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about.

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.

As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.

And if you have found your voice, you can be heard