Quotes About Expression

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion. Dancing is the body's song, and Bess sang.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides.

We do not select the stories we write, we do not pick the voices. They take us by surprise and we surrender to them. They write us, they write in us, all over us, through us. They occupy us. We are, in a sense, puppets--to language, with language.

the tongue, for instance, is privileged with information indifferent to words.

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.

Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

Alex grinned and then walked past him, murmuring, "I applaud you for your courage." "Courage?" he asked with confusion. "Hmm." She headed for the door to the hall, swinging her purse gaily as she went. "Many men find it difficult to come out of the closet.

I ain't a street busker, I'm a microphone hustler, manipulating lyrics I'm a lyrical shuffler.

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.

I came across a quote from the book Art and Fear that says it best: "Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did."3 And the gap never stays silent.

Why can't I seem to control my reactions? I stuff. I explode.

There is an abundant need in this world for your exact brand of beautiful.

Nothing will give you emotional laryngitis like living in close proximity to someone who refuses to listen. Having emotions but no voice chokes the life out of relationships.

remember that there is an abundant need in this world for your contributions to the kingdom . . . your thoughts and words and artistic expressions . . . your exact brand of beautiful.

Raw emotions — anger, frustration, bitterness, resentment — are the feelings we tend to hide from people we want to impress but spew on those we love the most.

You speak As one who fed on poetry.

You know There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken, More expressive may be than all words ever spoken.

When asked, 'What did you want to say in this work?' he would answer, 'I've said what I've said.' This made sense in where everyone assumed music had a meaning - but where saying the wrong thing could get a person killed. -Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

In fact, poetry has always been like archives that peoples have continually used to serve their feelings, thoughts, national identities and cultures, and it has served as a factor uniting different historical periods. Those who had lost contact with their past for a certain period found and experienced the expression of their own selves in poetry, and the were able to see their history as a whole in it.