Quotes About Expression

Martha Graham, speaking to dancers, could have been speaking to any artist, any writer: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening which is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.8

I have come to understand, through my own writing and through working with other writers, that fear is a friend of the writer. Where there is fear, there is buried treasure. Something important lies hidden—something that matters—like the angel waiting in the stone that Michelangelo began to carve.

That first voice, the voice of home, is the one the writer must protect from the contempt or disdain or disregard of any critic, no matter how famous or capable that critic may be. It is not all that a mature writer needs; surely every writer needs the tools of literary criticism and as much knowledge of various traditions as possible—but a profound acceptance of and trust in one's own voice is the first and most important thing the writer needs.

Writing is often a struggle between the personal and the universal, and the way writers deal with that struggle varies.

The issue for me, both as a writer and as a spiritual seeker, is courage—the courage to be there myself, and the courage to allow the reader to be there—to see, to touch, to taste, to smell,

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

If only faces could talk....

Art is a way of knowing what it is we actually believe.

Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.

Art is a means to enter, to play with, to dance with, to wrestle with anything that intrigues, delights, disturbs, or terrifies us.

Art is a vehicle that allows us to transcend linear time, to travel backward and forward into personal and transpersonal history, into possibilities that weren't realized and those that might be.

His intelligence seized on a subject, his genius embraced it, his eloquence illuminated it.

In person she was very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face. If not so regularly handsome as her sister, yet her countenance had a peculiar charm of its own to the eyes of most beholders.

There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

I've still got that little freedom part of me that wants to have a car that looks really sexy.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl's eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.

There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.

It's only fabric! Freestyle fabric cutting and sewing is a low-risk endeavor with a strong payoff of personal growth and empower- ment.

There is no room for church mice in improv quilting. You have to own your ideas, your choices, and your determination.

I've embarked on personal adventures with each of these quilts. I want to teach you how to do the same.

Take a good look at your fabric and intuit what it is saying to you.

The camera is an instrument of detection…we photograph what we know and what we don't know… when I point my camera at something I am asking a question and the photograph is sometimes an answer… In other words, I am not trying to prove anything. I am the one who is getting the lesson.