Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Inspirational, Writing, Listening

• I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Love, Future, Mean

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.159, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Believe, Book, Long

• I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Powerful, Stupid, School

• The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?

  Jeanette Winterson

  Past, Reality, Light

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.9, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• Language is a finding place, not a hiding place.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Language, Hiding, Hiding Place

  "Shafts of sunlight" by Jeanette Winterson, www.theguardian.com. November 14, 2008.

• Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Lying, Want, Language

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.100, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Song, Art, Dust

• Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mother, Art, Thinking

• That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Powerful, Literature, Language

• I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Healing, Reality, Light

• Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past. Of time to come, she says much, but who listens?

  Jeanette Winterson

  Past, Broken, Secret

  Jeanette Winterson (2005). “Weight”, p.46, Penguin Books India

• Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Art, Animal, Past

  Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

• …only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

  Jeanette Winterson

  World, Language, Poet

• To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Past, Would Be, Needs

  "Redemption songs". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

• Language is what stops the heart exploding.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Heart, Language, Exploding

  "Shafts of sunlight". www.theguardian.com. November 15, 2008.

• Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Death, Home, Class

• For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Giving, Emotion, Language

• One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Thinking, Issues, Vocabulary

  Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

• The best language is always found in books because it's considered. It's a high language. Sometimes, it is complex and difficult. It's empowering and offers a way to speak about yourself that you don't have if all you are doing is reading the newspaper and watching TV.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Reading, Empowering

  Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

• Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mother, Art, Thinking

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