Quotes About Expression

That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmanoeuvred years, had you in a chokehold, every part roughed up, the eyes dripping.

underscore the difficulty inherent in any attempt by black artists to metabolize real rage.

As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling." —

The purpose of art," James Baldwin wrote, "is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers." He might have been channeling Dostoyevsky's statement that "we have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.

Recognition of this lack might break you apart. Or recognition might illuminate the erasure the attempted erasure triggers. Whether such discerning creates a healthier, if more isolated, self, you can't know. In any case, Youngman doesn't speak to this kind of anger. He doesn't say that witnessing the expression of this more ordinary and daily anger might make the witness believe that a person is "insane." And

Words work as release—well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid—what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise—words encoding the bodies they cover. And despite everything the body remains.

Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about.

To converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and the unsaid.

All living is listening for a throat to open-- The length of its silence shaping lives. When he opened his mouth to speak, his speech was what was written in the silence, the length of the silence becoming a living.

He [Mihaly Babits] hoped that some god might offer a bed to the river of words which rose to his lips, so that it might flow between ordered banks to the sea, there to vanish.

True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.

Sabías que la poesía no es jamás sólo tuya, como el amor, sino de todos; no es el poeta el que crea las palabras, decías y declamabas, es la palabra la que se le hecha encima y le hace poeta...

El desencanto es un oxímoron, una contradicción que el intelecto no puede resolver y que sólo la poesía puede expresar y custodiar

A song can be more than words and music ... when sung with soul a song carries you to another world, to a place where no matter how much pain you feel, you are never alone.

Faith is not about a building or a lifestyle. You can minister in many ways besides attending services or being a preacher. And I think that that's what I feel most thankful for--that I have the opportunity to minister now, in my own way.

I think there is a predisposition among Christians that Hollywood is anti-Jesus or anti-Christianity. I was warned I'd have to fight to maintain the freedom to express my beliefs. It's an unfair stereotype, and so far that's been the farthest from the truth. While everyone I work with may not share my beliefs, I have been surrounded by nothing but support.

If other people choose to believe because I do, great. I want to show people God's love through what I do and who I am. At the same time, I don't feel I need to pass out Bibles at the concert.

I liked being able to work with all the different producers and take what they brought to the table and bring my own style to it.

The poet wants to 'say' something. Why, then, doesn't he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

And for her, now, replaced by the plain language of the dogs, who in a few syllables have everything to say.

I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core.

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

The fact is that no language can be truly alive that is not used by women.

No one knows why we do it and when we've done it rarely does anyone want it. Yet still we do it. That's what being a writer is.