Quotes About Expression

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bash? instructed, "The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective." "Don't you mean too subjective or too objective?" his student asked. Bash? answered, simply, "No.

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

In poetry's words, life calls to life —Jane Hirshfield

Free verse follows 'the breath of a thought where it leads'.

No matter how difficult the subject, while writing, a poet is unchained from sadness, and free —Jane Hirshfield

Words are not the highest reality, nor' what is expressed in words the highest reality. Why? Because the highest reality is an experience which cannot be entered into by means of statements' regarding it. Poetry and visual symbols come much closer to reality. The mind must be in a state of wisdom to understand wisdom.

I love my life as a writer and mapmaker of family relationships.

My throat feels hard and swollen, as if bulky words are trying to choke me.

The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

After a day of watching the two-legs interact from within their midst, she was certain that they could talk as well as any wolf. Unlike wolves, however, they mostly used their mouths, a thing she found limiting. How could you tell someone to keep away from your food when your own mouth was full?

His features, like those of his cousin Norvin Norwood, were aquiline rather than handsome, but unlike Norvin, whose grey eyes seemed to hold something of a raptor's fierceness, Jared's similar visage was mild.

French-English

If toes had eyes, then I could see how my feet know where to go, but toes are blind. And how is it that my tongue speaks words it cannot hear? Because for all its eloquence, the tongue itself is deaf, and flaps in soundlessness.

There seems to be no unexpressed self in animals, as if they are as fully themselves in flesh as possible, with no lag of consciousness to fill up, while we keep trying to grow into something else.

True religion is not repressive, as life itself is not.

Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.

I believe only in art and failure.

People ask me how I keep my figure, and I tell them it's because I paint. When you're covered in paint, it's quite hard to put food in your mouth!

Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.