Quotes About Expression

Dellray had advanced degrees—including psychology and philosophy (yes, one could philosophize as a hobby)—but he somehow fell naturally into a street patois of his own making, not gang-talk, not African American Vernacular English. It was, like his clothing and his penchant for reading Heidegger and Kant to his children, pure Dellray.

What good is it to perform anyway? The audience sits there like logs, they cough and sneeze, they don't dress up anymore. Do you know what it's like playing Brahms for people wearing blue jeans and T-shirts?

studio and the junkyards

My lord, if a man cannot express his honestly held views in the Central Criminal Court, perhaps you can advise me where else he is free to state that which he believes to be the truth?

Graffiti, Dimitri explained

Whenever you're interviewed, think British, act Yiddish

tongue could not be swallowed.

pencil hadn't stopped scribbling

Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.

Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in sadness, joy, or regret. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

She wanted out of that decorating scheme.

Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

That's how people live, by telling stories. What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? "Tell me a story." That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

My goal in life is to become an adjective, Leonard said. People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.

Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?

Her tragedy hadn't made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.

If this story is written only for myself, then so be it. But it doesn't feel that way. I feel you out there, reader. This is the only kind of intimacy I'm comfortable with. Just the two of us, here in the dark.

Though she carried on few extended conversations, we got an idea of her state of mind from the little that got back to us of the little she said.

She'd always been a failed bohemian, anyway.