Quotes About Expression

it became clear to her observers that she was not quick at shifting her facial scenery. It was as though her countenance had so long been set in an expression of unchallenged superiority that the muscles had stiffened, and refused to obey her orders.

plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.

Women ought to be free—as free as we are, he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

When she said to him once It looks as if it was painted! it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.

Mereu aceeaÈ™i platitudine È™i lips? de relief, aceeaÈ™i uniformitate a m??tii americane, cu expresia ei de dr?g?l??enie inofensiv?. … Chipurile lor sem?nau cu acele peisaje din Vestul Mijlociu, cu acei nesfârÈ™iÈ›i kilometri de lanuri de grâu care separ? între ele dou? staÈ›ii de cale ferat?.

He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again

The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling, and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion.

In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women's faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as

That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!

Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

He hasn't written a line for twenty years. A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years? Wade surprised him. The real kind, I should say.

What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming out ball.

She clutched her manuscript, carrying it tenderly through the crowd, like a live thing that had been hurt.

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

Courage is about the most useful thing in an artist's outfit.

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia," she reflected, "they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.

Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women's faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes. What Claydon read there—or at least such scattered

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even though but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.

A]rt can never give the rules that make an art.

I have often observed, that on mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frighted, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion, whose appearance I endeavored to imitate; nay, I am convinced it is hard to avoid it, though one strove to separate the passion from its correspondent gestures. Our minds and bodies are so closely and intimately connected, that one is incapable of pain or pleasure without the other.