Quotes About Expression

Little idiosyncratic expressions can form A sense of who one is. Who one was. One can, hypothetically, be brought back In the form of an actor Who gives an after the fact replication Of text conveyed in a character's voice. I can no more understand the world as a stage Of myself, mired as I am, In this missing.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous sonnet. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways....

You were the devil's daughter even then, you just lacked the experience to fully express your natural outrageousness.

Children often sang, adults seldom. At what age did the singing stop?

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.

Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.

He'd died his blond hair purple in honor of his best friend's wedding, and he wore skinny white jeans, a red shirt, and

Our humor turns our anger into a fine art.

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.

Jane Austen's narrative style seems to me to show (especially in the later novels) a curiously chameleon-like faculty; it varies in colour as the habits of expression of the several characters impress themselves on the relation of the episode in which they are involved, and on the description of their situations.

I suspect that Jane Austen's practice of denying herself the aid of figurative language which, as much as any of her other habits of expression, repelled Charlotte Brontë, and has alienated other readers, conscious with a dissatisfaction with her style that they have not cared to analyse.

In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.

People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.

I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood.

I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel - everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.-

I learned a long time ago that if I really wanted to bring my ideas into experience, I needed to write down my intentions. When you put pen to paper, you have little choice but to get specific. The actual process of forming your thoughts into words on a page is a creative act, a genesis, moving energy toward the very thing you want to experience.

There is a world of communication which is not dependent on words.

The communication is in the work and words are no substitute for this.

That one doesn't paint a landscape, a seascape, a figure; one paints the effect of a time of day on a landscape, a seascape, or a figure.

Do not copy me," [Antoine] Bourdelle repeatedly told his students. "Sing your own song.

Raising a child, managing a household, and being a good wife, all the while focusing on expressing herself in ways that had never been done before, took an enormous toll on Morisot

One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.