Quotes About Expression

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always 20 times better.

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.

There is nothing more valuable than the printed word.

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

Conversation lets you be an artist every time you open your mouth--or shut it. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, "The most important art is to omit"; the key to being a master conversationalist is to listen at least as much as you talk. Just as the other arts include pauses in a dramatic play, white margins around printed text, and space between a singer's phrases, conversation is about silences as well as about words.

Eventually you will get into the habit of enjoying line as a language all of its own.

New ideas are created when they can be discussed freely, but if there is a CORRECT view then you cease to have new ideas

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

She had to find a way to lift them together. The only thing she had was a moan. And she moaned. That moan would become a Spiritual; that Spiritual would become Jazz; which would become Blues then Rhythm and Blues then Rap. That moan would define not only a people but the nation to which they were sailing. That moan would make those people decide that they should, that they could, live.

Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak.

Some people are born with words flowing in their veins.

I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!

I think of my feather pen as something magical that still belongs to a wing. All I need is paper, ink, and the courage to let wild words soar.

I sing without knowing what my song means, and whether the listening world is amazed or wounded.

I feel certain that words can be as human as people, alive with the breath of compassion.

Why can't she see that no two people are exactly alike? Our hearts and minds are all different. Only our dreams share this same desperate need to rise and soar...

Long hair is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.

There is a bird in my chest with wings too broad with beak that rips me wanting to get out. I have called it an idiot parrot. I have called it a ravening eagle. But it sings. Bird of no name your cries are red and wet on the iron air. I open my mouth to let you out and your shining blinds me.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.

A faintly puzzled expression, if the term is not too specific, passed a leisurely way over Mr. Whippet's indeterminate features.

If you weren't in love and therefore insane I should punch your head, my boy.