Voice Quotes

Poetry or science, what matters is saying it how you see it. Saying precisely what and how you saw, and no more. In science, poetry or describing a journey, accuracy is all you can do. Saying it as you saw.

~ Ruth Padel

A great voice is a unique instrument, not to sound like another instrument, but to be played like one.

~ Jeffrey Fry

The man’s words were as deep and dark as midnight

~ Elise Kova

I lost my voice and my best friend tooOn swift, fierce winds and wings of blue, The cold rain fell where beams had shone, So I wrapped up tight and safe. Alone.But I missed my friend, I missed my voice, And my heart still whispered of another choiceTo break out of my binding, safe, and warm,And see what the world looked like after the storm.So I struggled free and was greeted byColorful brushstrokes across the sky,The melody of the summer breezeAnd blue wings like mine in hazel trees.On the soft, sweet air of the mountain glade,We gathered together in cool, green shade,And told our stories, beginnings to ends,And found our song in the hearts of new friends.

~ Elaine Vickers

I get the sense that some people think that influence dilutes – that the more you are someone else, the less you are yourself, as if you were born with some innate distinct youness that is gradually sanded away by the corroding forces of conformity. That if you could somehow tune everything else out and really dig deep within yourself, you’d find your voice there, pure and independent.That’s bullshit. Your voice isn’t there, already made. You need to make your own voice. You need to make your own voice.

~ Raphael Bob-Waksberg

She had a voice so husky it could have pulled a dogsled, and the gun she was holding gave me a bad case of barrel envy.

~ Patrick Major Dallas Or

Christ asked people who follow him to be the voice for the voiceless - not to wire their mouths shut.

~ Christina Engela

Her voice was perfect, custom-made for my ears. I wanted to hit the record button in my brain and save this all for later. Half of me was listening to her words, but the other half was mesmerized by the melody.

~ Kathy Hatfield

Ignore the voice that scorns and ridicules to ensure it does not mold you. Stifling subtleties like these, if unchecked, are oppressive. Freedom is a love supreme birthright, not a privilege to be governed by any other.

~ T.f. Hodge

A person’s voice can have such a powerful experience on the listener, very different from looking at the words on the page.

~ Frank Beddor

We come into this world crying and calling, wailing and singing; and for the first months of our life all our needs and instincts, our dissatisfactions and discoveries are immediately vocalized without apology and without censor.

~ Paul Newham

She had a good, strong voice. She smiled with her voice, too. This, he thought, was the magic that had drawn him to her.

~ Carolyn Jewel

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Sound has a profound effect on the senses. It can be both herd and felt. It can even be seen with the mind’s eye. It can almost be tasted and smelled. Sound can evoke responses of the five senses. Sound can paint a picture, produce a mood, trigger the senses to remember another time and place. From infancy we hear sound with our entire bodies. When I hear my own name, I have as much a sense of it entering my body through my back or my hand or my chest as through my ears. Sound speaks to the sensorium; the entire system of nerves that stimulates sensual responce.

~ Louis Colaianni

Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you’re worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.

~ Marya Hornbacher

The voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut.

~ Raymond Chandler

Do the other kids make fun of you? For how you talk?''Sometimes.''So why don't you do something about it? You could learn to talk differently, you know.'But this is my voice. How would you be able to tell when I was talking?

~ Lauren Oliver

What if part of God's message to the world was you, the true and real you?

~ Donald Miller

You always thought older people were wiser. It's not that. It's just that our relatives are dead and we're able to speak freely.

~ Ariel Gore

This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?

~ Kiese Laymon

His voice is deep and gravelly. I once heard one of the girls say that he had the voice of a sex god, but because I've never really heard what a sex god sounds like, I can't verify that.

~ Melina Marchetta

The man had one of those dark, deep voices, the kind that made men listen and women shed their clothing.

~ Alexandra Martin

...if you want your own distinctive voice, you first have to become someone...

~ John Geddes

Only by glaring into the depths of ones own reflection can we find our true selves. It is here where the mirrored voices of our souls speak and can be heard.

~ Paul Morabito

God will hear your cry even when your voice can't shout out loud unto him. He will see your tears even when can no longer shed any.

~ Gugu Mona

Her laughter changed her voice from wind chimes to the jingling of sleigh bells.

~ Leland Dirks

If I’m surprised at where I’m at, it’s probably because I’m not listening to the reality that listening to the voices that I’ve listened to have put me here. So, maybe I should be less surprised and more disappointed.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Don't waste your tremendous voice writing messages in the sand.

~ Lorin Morgan-Richards

We are living in glorious days where each readers' voice can be heard.

~ Sara Sheridan

It's amazing what the sound of a voice you've been longing to hear can do to your heart. He spoke five words just now, but in the time it took him to speak those five words, my heart was shredded and minced, then placed back inside my chest with the expectation that it should somehow know how to beat again.

~ Colleen Hoover

It's easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

...listening with absorbed attention more to her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking how like she was, flowering through her voice into beauty in the darkness, to some butterflies he had come across in the Swiss mountains the summer before. When they were folded up they were grey, mothlike creatures that one might easily overlook, but directly they opened their wings they became the loveliest things in the world, all rose-colour or heavenly blue. So had she been to him in the daylight that afternoon,--an ordinary woman, not in any way noticeable; but now listen to her, opening into beauty on the wings of her voice!

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it’s not about voice, it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.

~ Kathleen Jamie

Each of us has one. Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

I've always loved fixing broken things.If something fixed by myself caused a smile, I'd feel saved. In that case it would be worth it. And I was delighted.

~ Hiro Kiyohara

It doesn't take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.

~ Fredrik Backman

At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds.

~ Frederick Weisel

My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

He spoke in a trembling voice that didn’t seem to be entirely in sync with the movement of his lips. That’s because sound travels slower in halitosis.

~ Sorin Suciu

Everything she wanted to tell her, was unable to tell her, because she was afraid of hearing her own voice come out of her heart and be covered with blood, and then she poured all the blood into these syllables, and she offered it to her to drink like this : “You have it.

~ Hélène Cixous