“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 languages of others. we can turn to the poem. we can open the book. somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.” (9)
"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." (40)
“i had lines inside of 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.” (40)
“it took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. the one that writes you is dangerous. you go where you don’t want to go. you look where you don’t want to look.” (54)
“books, for me, are a home. books don’t make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
there is warmth there too - a hearth. i sit down with a book and i am warm. i know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep.” (61)
“her suffering was her armour. gradually it became her skin. then she could not take it off. she died without painkillers and in pain.” (69)
“on the top of the hill looking out over the town i wanted to see further than anybody had seen. that wasn’t arrogance; it was desire. i was all desire, desire for life.
and i was lonely.
mrs winterson had succeeded there ; her own loneliness, impossible to breach, had begun to wall us all in.” (105)
also j.w. words, so astutely, my idealistic (& unhealthy) perspective on love:
“when i walked away that night i was yearning for love and loyalty. the wide yearning of my nature had to funnel through a narrow neck - it went into the idea of “the other”, the almost twin, who would be so near to me but not me. a plato-like split of a complete being. we would find each other one day - and then everything would be all right.
i had to believe that - how else would i have coped? and yet i was heading for the dangerous losses that “all or nothing” love demands.” (120)
finding my language through the words of others is why.
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