Quotes About Expression

Visibility makes possible, but it also disciplines: disciplines gender, disciplines genre.)

You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That's part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.

One problem with lyrical waxing, as Snediker has it, is that it often signals (or occasions) an infatuation with overarching concepts or figures that can run roughshod over the specificities of the situation at hand.

attempts to nail down "who we really are" most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas

Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!" Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The Oblivion Seekers, a collection one critic has described as "one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world.

Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don't

Everywhere I go as a writer—especially if I'm in drag as a "memoirist"—such fears seem to be first and foremost on people's minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.)

The problem is, of course, that art typically requires an audience, which loops us right back to the problem of observing actions and losing ourselves in consideration of their imagined form.

The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces.

I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.

This is one of the things I've learned about happiness: when you feel it, it's good to say so. That way, if and when you say later in depression or despair, "I've just never been happy," there will be a trail of audible testimony in your wake indicating otherwise.

I insisted that words did more than nominate.

I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.

I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

We were dancing the way people dance when they are telling each other how they want to make love.

It's like she's pulling Post-it notes out of her hair and lecturing from them, one of my peers once complained about the teaching style of my beloved teacher Mary Ann Caws. ...Ditto Eileen Myles, who tells a great story about a student at UC San Diego once complaining that her lecturing style was like 'throwing a pizza at us.' My feeling is, you should be so lucky to get a pizza in the face from Eileen Myles, or a Post-it note plucked from the nest of Mary Ann Caws's hair.

But what goes on in you when you talk about colour as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease.

And yet, at the same time, it feels disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that on a literal level, having a small body, a slender body, has long been related to my sense of self, even my sense of freedom.

Joan Mitchell—abstract painter

Les Bluets, which she painted in 1973

10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.