Quotes About Expression

It's a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...

As great poets do, he found a way to transmute the personal wound into something larger.

In the book, he said, the self is fixed, made concrete; the book is the intersection of the soul and time.

Poetry exists to find words for what resists easy naming; we are most often driven to write it or read it when any other sort of language seems incapable of the work required.

Unspeakable"--unspeakability?--comes in three varieties. First, that which cannot be said because one does not know it, and therefore cannot say it. Second, that which cannot be spoken because it is culturally impermissible to do so. And third, that which cannot be named because it is impossible, since the language provides no terms, no words to enable articulation.

It thrills me that I don't know why; the fact that poems do things they should not be able to do, through means not fully apprehensible--well, it makes me treasure them all the harder.

This lack of support is not simply an absence of encouragement. It can be as deep as the outright denial of some particular way in which we want to express ourselves.

would say that many, if not most people, grow up in a family and cultural environment that gives little, if any, objective, nonjudgmental support to the unique ways in which we feel compelled to express ourselves

Perhaps in time, Ella, the words we have lost will fade, and we will all stop summoning them by habit, only to stamp them out like unwanted toadstools when they appear. Perhaps they will eventually disappear altogether, and the accompanying halts and stammers as well: those troublesome, maddening pauses that at present invade and punctuate through caesura all manner of discourse. Trying so desperately we all are, to be ever so careful.

Any one of us could have come up with such a sentence. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters.

Love one another, push the perimeter of this glorious language.

The thing with me. I can't stick musicians. I've thought about this. I can't stand them, and being stuck in a studio with them I think that's my strength I can hear what they can't.

If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.

Rock & roll isn't even music really. It's a mistreating of instruments to get feelings over.

When I fiddle around with their amps, it's because it needs to be done. I must be hearing it different to them. But you'd be surprised by how many people tell me that it works. Not that I need telling. I know it works.

Copying lies at the heart of creativity.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that the limits of one's language were the limits of one's world. By coming up with fresh and arresting words to describe the world accurately, the writer expands the boundaries of her world, and possibly her readers' world, too. Real writing can do what R. P. Blackmur said it could: add to the stock of available reality. There

Writing is hard. It's tough to get up in the morning and look at the white snowfield of a trackless page. How to push forward? Use anger; use rage if you have to. Settle scores. And if you have no scores to settle, then create a few for yourself, not only for the purposes of public relations, but also for the purposes of inspiration. Hot-blooded, hot-tempered, always ready to take offense: the writer as duelist.

You know I don't have much experience of big families, but from what I've seen there are two types. The type where everything is out in the open, where they argue and shout and slam doors, and where disagreements are dealt with loudly and quickly. And the other type, where no one really says what they mean, where everyone tiptoes around and emotions are kept buried. ~Here to Stay

Storytellers don't run out of stories, they just run out of time.

It is not the ink and the paper that matter, but the hand that holds the pen.

Russians can be unhappy, yet still loyal. Putin is to a large extent being rated not as a man, not even as a politician, but as an icon of Russia. To vote for him is not to endorse a program, but to express patriotism

One absolutely crucial element in moving your brain from panic to logic is to put words to what you're feeling at each stage.