Quotes About Expression

You're breaking out of character, again.

The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.

Here is a drawing of a stapler:

My voice and movements are restricted by the things I own.

Recently, I've discovered Radiohead and find them to be quite good. So clearly, I'm some kind of musical retard. (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic)

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that's going to happen is if you actually do it. People can't read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page. So you have to do it, goddamnit.

Not many songs can fend off evil. But the right song with the right voice can be a weapon; anyone who's listened to music through headphones while riding the subway or plowing angrily through a rush-hour sidewalk knows how it can and separate you from them, allows you to say to the teeming masses that you are this and they are that.

You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in the world. So angry that his face contorted in photos. The camera was a question and his face did not know the answer.

What can one do with one's hands when the camera is interested in other things?

And the only thing worse than the silencing of a martyr, a real martyr – someone with dangerous ideas – is silencing someone who has nothing at all to say.

Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.

I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster.

Oscar Wilde wrote, Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascination... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write.

There are times when I am concerned about Toph's expression when I'm really singing, with vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts and everything—an expression that to the untrained eye might look like abject terror, or revulsion—but I know well enough that it is awe.

No man should have to endure another man quoting poetry.

In terms of your own zinging, we'd expect about ten or so a day, but that's sort of a minimum. I'm sure you'll have more to say than that.

The needed to talk about Annie, the thoughts she was thinking. Why shouldn't they know them? The world deserved nothing less and would not wait.

Why do you want to share your suffering? By sharing I will dilute it.

Why do you want to share your suffering?' By sharing I will dilute it.

We've sent over 180 million frowns from the U.S alone, and you can bet that has an effect on the regime.

Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all.

Jean Kirkpatrick, made a strong point during her career that left-wing totalitarianism was far more dangerous than fascism. She maintained that fascism invariably left alone areas of cultural expression that it did not consider directly threatening to its political existence.

The letters make words and words make us.

Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line?