« All Language Quotes · Jeanette Winterson's Page
Language Quotes by Jeanette Winterson
- 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,…
- To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
- Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
- 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…
- 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…
- …only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.
- Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.
- 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…
- 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…
- Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
- 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.…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
More Language Quotes
- Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by… — Hannah Arendt
- High thoughts must have high language. — Aristophanes
- In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement… — Aristotle
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- War is what happens when language fails. — Margaret Atwood
- As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically. — Diane Ackerman