Quotes About Expression

A chemical semaphore passes through Nick's brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.

But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.

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

People who still love words have to be forgiven everything.

I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?

The classic Ebola face made the monkeys look as if they had seen something beyond comprehension.

collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks.

Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some important or possibly historic moment in their lives. . . . I remember only too well what I said to General Somervell that day. I said, "Oh." As

The impersonality of the written word made it the easiest means of exchange...

Have you ever noticed that the expression "the light of the world" is used to describe the Christ (John 8:12), but that Jesus also applies the same phrase to us? (Matthew 5:14, "You are the light of the world.")

Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience.

Good art seems absolutely essential to healthy religion.

Myth is, in fact, something that is so true that it can be adequately expressed only in story, symbol, and ritual. It can't be abstracted and objectified. Its meaning and mystery are so deep and broad that they can be presented only in story form. When you step into a story, you find it is without limits and you can walk around with it and inside it. It is natural to sing, dance, and reenact a story. It is too big and too deep to be merely "understood" or taught.

I hear you don't write any more, he says... Not true, I inform him. You should see the margins of my student papers. Not the same as writing a book though, right? Almost identical, I assure him. Both go largely unread.

She hadn't so much spoken the words as let them out of their cages….

He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.

He's got a good, righteous head of steam up, and I envy him this. He's saying things that friendship has kept him from saying for twenty years, and their release at this late date is orgasmic. Asking him to stop would be like asking him to pull out.

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.

I remember vividly wishing she wouldn't do that, that she'd let him arrange his thoughts and feelings the way he wanted. After all, how does one invalidate a powerful feeling? Not with logic, surely.

The best she was able to do was to reflect that people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit-and-run posing as democracy in action.

I write about it not because I understand it, but because I don't.

These days his own storytelling was undermined by his stammer, as well as by his conviction that a story had to be true.

Indeed, a good hint that you've entered the realm of Art is that you immediately feel like giving up.