Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery QUOTES

1 " 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 , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

2 " To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

3 " Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

4 " A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

5 " Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

6 " The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

7 " True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are. A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don't want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you? "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

8 " We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in. . . . It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

9 " When I had no books and had to learn everything I needed off by heart, and when I had to hide what books I had, I promised myself a library filled with the best editions I could afford. I have it now. Books bought out of books. A red room with deep chairs and a fireplace lit. Books of every kind, but no paperbacks, and certain shelves where First Editions are. This is not my study, where there are plenty of paperbacks, it is a contemplative island cut off from busyness, set outside of time. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

10 " If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

11 " She was night-time and words were the dream. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

12 " I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

13 " What you fuck is much more important than how you write. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

14 " This is one reason why it remains anarchic even at its most canonised. The modern world is Time’s fool. Art is master of itself. But, you may say, who has long hours for a book these days? The answer must be whoever wants to read one. A reader must pick up a book, then the reader must pick up the beat. At that moment the clock is stopped. Now I am getting his beat into my brain (the rhythm is the main thing in writing). "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

15 " A work of art is abundant, spills out, gets drunk, sits up with you all night and forgets to close the curtains, dries your tears, is your friend, offers you a disguise, a difference, a pose. Cut and cut it through and there is still a diamond at the core. Skim the top and it is rich. The inexhaustible energy of art is transfusion for a worn-out world. When I read Virginia Woolf she is to my spirit, waterfall and wine. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

16 " Art is a way into other realities, other personalities. When I let myself be affected by a book, I let into myself new customs and new desires. The book does not reproduce me, it re-defines me, pushes at my boundaries, shatters the palings that guard my heart. Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists. They could not do this if they merely reflected what already exists. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

17 " It is the poet who goes further than any human scientist. The poet who with her dredging net must haul up difficult things and return them to the present. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

18 " Asla yalan söylemeyin. İçinizde hiçbir şey kıpırdamadıysa bir şeyin sizi etkilediğini asla söylemeyin. Siz bir kitabı elinize alabilirsiniz ama bir kitap sizi odanın öbür ucuna fırlatabilir. Bir kitap sizi rahat koltuğunuzdan alıp deniz kenarındaki kayalıklara taşıyabilir. Bir kitap sizi kocanızdan, karınızdan, çocuklarınızdan, bütün benliğinizden ayırabilir. Ömür boyu çektiğiniz bir acıyı dindirebilir. Kitaplar kinetiktir ve her devasa güç gibi, onu elinizde tutarken dikkatli olmanız gerekir. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

19 " Sanat sıradışıdır; alışılagelmiş yöntemle onu ehlileştirerek ya da yemleyerek kalıplara sokmaya çalışmak nafiledir. Kim hayvanat bahçesine gidip de aslanı biraz olsun anlamış ki? "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

20 " Toplum kadınları topal bırakır ve onları sakat yaratmış olan sanki Tanrı, Doğa ya da genetik faktörlermiş gibi davranır. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery