Quotes About Expression

Perfume should tell a story – the story of who you are, who you might be, perhaps even of who you fear becoming…

that's what he said.

I'll say whatever I want. I'm not a book. You can't burn me!

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.

Women need to become literary 'criminals,' break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.

Education,' one of R's teachers taught, 'teaches you not to be yourself.' But who is yourself? R decided if it or he wasn't blood, it wasn't anything.

Without language the only people the rebels can kill are themselves.

What she really wanted [...] was [...] to experience every emotion to the limit so she could go beyond every limit.

Come alive, dead heart, and sing.

Since an emotion's an announcement of value, in this society of the death (of values) emotions moved like zombies through humans.

It's not my fault that the gray of everyone else's stories makes the color stand out.

She says her only wish is to get out of this country, where there is no life, no freedom. 'They have killed off beauty, and art, and literature and all that is beautiful and good in life. Press freedom? This is what they call press freedom! If someone has the courage to write things as they are, prison is the result, ' she says.

It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.

I still struggle with the belief that I should be producing something more tangible or useful in the world. 'You should do work that makes a real difference,' scolds the voice in my head.... I worried I was being self- indulgent, spending hour after hour engaged in the slow, halting process of moving from experience to thought to word. What, really, was the point? Why would anyone else care? Why should I? I am coming to believe that there is room in the world for all our stories.

The writer's special talent is to empathize with people and imagine their lives. We know them as we write them.

I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world.

The simultaneous existence and shared residence of such opposite moods and feelings is well-illustrated by Franz Schubert's assertion that whenever he sat down to write songs of love he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he sat down to write songs of pain he wrote songs of love.

he slowly put down the hamburger he was eating, stared straight into my eyes, and, without missing a beat, said rather dryly, "That explains a lot.

posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960. Its haunting

The great imaginative artists have always sailed in the wind's eye, and brought back with them words or sounds or images to counterbalance human woes. That they themselves were subject to more than their fair share of these woes deserves our appreciation, understanding, and very careful thought.

My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches' brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes, and I filled page after page with what I am sure, thinking back on it, were very strange responses.

Schubert's posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960. Its

Think pink. A better way of life.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.