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Expression Quotes
"We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe."
42
"So much importance pressed into so few words. It was just like Jacin."
42
"I am not much given to profanity, but when I am sorely aggravated and vexed in spirit I declare to you that it comes as such a relief to me, such a solace to my troubled soul, and brings me such Heavenly peace to every now and then allow a word of phrase to escape my lips which can serve me no other earthly purpose, seemingly, other than to render emphatic my otherwise mildly expressed ideas."
42
"Write what you feel. Write because of that need for expression."
42
"Creativity is leading the life king-size, despite you being a pauper!"
42
"A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch."
41
"Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?"
41
"Criticize me if you can, but that won't stop me from saying what i like, my mouth is mine, and not yours."
41
"Let all of life be an unfettered howl."
41
"My films are the expression of momentary desires. I follow my instincts, but in a disciplined way."
40
"When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression."
40
"That was how we spoke, my mother and I: in puns and games and rhymes. In, you might say, lyrics. This was our tragedy. We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny. We were tinpan alleycats, but the gift of music had been withheld. We could not sing along, though we always knew the words. Still, defiantly, we roared our tuneless roars, we fell off the high notes and were trampled by the low ones. And if bitter ices were the consequence, well, there were worse fates in the world than that."
40
"Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom."
40
"From a person standpoint, the old expression of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is somewhat true."
39
"Style, no matter how outrageous it is, is still an expression of someone's personality. And my personality is somewhere stuck in the classics."
39
"When you read my poems or quotes remember you're stepping into the mind that steps outside of me."
39
"I quote others only in order the better to express myself."
39
"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."
38
"Sometimes it's not what you say, Valkyrie, it's just the fact that you're saying it."
38
"Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me."
37
"In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all."
37
"That is what intrigues me; songwriting and song structure and expression."
37
"For the stage displays the first vigorous expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of private individuality."
37
"I moved further and further away from mass entertainment. The sexual element became increasingly sinister and bizarre. Don't blame me! The bastards drove me to it! They all backed off after that!"
36
"There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything."
36
"Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new."
35
"By the end of the week, if I'm still alive, I get to write whatever I want about it all."
35
"David Bowie and Boy George created a safely contained theatrical expression of gay style."
35
"I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully."
35
"I used to find great difficulty in drawing feet."
34
"Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression."
34
"Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented."
34
"I recognize the power of silence in an extroverted world but there is a time for silence and a time to speak up about things that matter that continue to be left unsaid."
34
"My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am."
34
"Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's. The meaning of 'God' may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world."
34
"There's a difference between disclosing that which is only your business and hiding away from the world and not seeing, shining and sharing your magic."
34
"I hate that expression, 'fusion.' What it means to me is this movement where nothing ever really fused."
34
"A flower does not use words to announce its arrival to the world, it just blooms."
33
"I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure."
33
"America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing."
33
"In order to recognize the Truth, you have to separate yourself from the Truth; and to explain the Truth, you have to separate yourself from the recognition. This is why a wordsmithed Truth is nothing but a shadow of the shadow of the Truth. If Buddha had yawned instead of holding up a fower, would that gesture have been any less representative of the Truth?"
33
"All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts."
33
"How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?"
33
"Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words."
33
"The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?"
32
"A common allegiance to form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known."
32
"Hold your pen and spare your voice."
32
"There was all the world and his wife."
32
"Not the measure of words is necessary, but their meaning."
32
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