Quotes About Expression

Each poet creates an expatriate space, a slightly skewed domain where things are freshly felt because they are freshly said.

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting-Marcel Duchamp

Art should grasp the mind the way the vagina grasps the penis-Marcel Duchamp

Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by-the-way?

How sick one gets of being 'good ' how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours embody selfishness.

Beauvoir was untouched by the criticisms; her diary was a record of one consciousness, her own: "This is what I saw and how I saw it. I have not tried to say more.

they are aware of having been misunderstood as children, they feel that the fault lay with them and with their inability to express themselves appropriately.

We name us and then we are lost, tamed I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness

Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody? I serve the poem, no one.

I can't translate myself into language any more.

oh each poet's a beautiful human girl who must die.

What did you do in your songs? I don't know, I'll never know, you say. Someone else will write them about me, won't they? I looked into a void of love. And I fell down. There was nothing else there. No where, where I was no one. But I have to sing this song. I'm still here.

I am the only language I can understand.

I'm the one who has no small feelings

cry out with me turn on the lights

I'm alive and dead now, at the same time, speaking in your poems.

You talk to me in your sleep, the only time you talk to me.

I don't want to speak this language that doesn't know me.

But I've always been a poet, that's all, no sex or race, no age or face. Can Eternity strip me of it? That's only another word. I'm inside myself, and inside it.

I don't remember how to speak for myself anymore

We are our songs and films.

I know I sound plaintive. I sound desperate.

Writing a poem, I construct a magenta fan with a photolikeness, enclosed in a central oval, of a beloved relation, with her hair brown that is not to say, before her hair turned grey: it's her essential self. Someone's jealous of the attention I'm paying her in my work because he wants it all for his art which is a pure, gridded, layer of words painted in crosshatched grey monochrome brushstrokes. Your art, he seems to say to me, kisses life's ass. His art asks that his own ass be kissed.

It isn't a good price, that you pay for writing a poem.