Quotes About Expression

Playing the violin or writing a poem are special ways of paying attention. They are acts at once small and great. Although only one person can commit them, they require orderly marshallings of countless and diverse forces, something like the great landing of armies in Normandy, but incalculably bigger and more complicated.

Conformity is the enemy of friendship

But the difficulty of changing a typescript can also have what seems to be the opposite effect: You let go. You stop caring about certainty; you stop editing yourself, stop second-guessing yourself, and simply write—mistakes and all.

There are people who will choose quality communication over quantity, who want to express themselves in a message to another individual in a way that slow writing can encourage, and e-mailing and texting often discourage.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.

In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.

The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone's desire.

The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlighetti, and Bellow -- writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn't know English could permit.

We are made for art . . . The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They'd spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.

Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

Isn't the point of music to move listeners? Mattison smiled. No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits. And tradition? Real composers make their own.

Art is not a mobocracy. It's a republic.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

Olivia leans in. Are you okay? His reply sticks in his wide, coprophagic grin.

I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

Culture) Some part of us could model some other modeler. and out of that simple loop came all the love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts.

life is trying to say something no one hears.

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music's threat.

Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they've lived through.