Quotes About Expression

Las traducciones son meras aproximaciones subjetivas. Y eso es todo lo que experimento respecto a cuanto digo: no es lo que estoy pensando sino lo máximo que puedo aproximarme a lo que pienso por medio del lenguaje, con sus defectuosas y constrictivas reducciones. Y por eso a menudo pienso que es mejor no decir nada que expresarme de una manera inexacta.

She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

He were still smiling but his voice were hard as a spoon rattling in a metal cup.

I met a man at a party. He said "I'm writing a novel" I said "Oh really? Neither am I.

I do feel like I have important, beautiful things to say about the world, I just can't think of them at this particular instant.

Poetry has isolated me from the world more than it has connected me to it.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.

The feeling for words comes at an early age--or rather it is lost in most cases at any early age, leaving the rest poets" (170).

The real reason that language so often carries magic is because humans have trouble not ascribing special power to it. Language makes so many things happen. If we say or write words in a certain way, we can make people see things that aren't there and feel things they have no reason to feel—all this with mere mouth sounds or paper marks.

The real problem is writers' refusal to take full and open responsibility for what they are saying. If a writer is willing to say, in effect, "I'm me, I'm saying this, and I'm saying it to you," his words will not just have more life in them, they will also be clearer and more coherent. The