Art Objects Quotes

“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

“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

“I argue that it is not Woolf's remoteness that puts people off but her nearness that terrifies them. Her language is not a woolly blanket it is a sharp sword. The Waves, which is the most difficult of her works, is a strong-honed edge through the cloudiness most of us call life. It is uncomfortable to have the thick padded stuff ripped away. There is no warm blanket to be had out of Virginia Woolf; there is wind and sun and you naked. It is not remoteness of feeling in Woolf, it is excess; the unbearable quiver of nerves and the heart pounding. It is exposure.


And it is exactness.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“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

“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

“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

“Woolf worried about the childlessness from time to time, and suffered from the imposed anxiety that she was not, unlike her friend Vita Sackville-West, a real woman. I do not know what kind of woman one would have to be to stand unflinchingly in front of The Canon, but I would guess, a real one. There is something sadistic in the whip laid on women to prove themselves as mothers and wives at the same time as making their way as artists. The abnormal effort that can be diverted or divided. We all know the story of Coleridge and the Man from Porlock. What of the woman writer and a whole family of Porlocks?

For most of us the dilemma is rhetorical but those women who are driven with consummate energy through a single undeniable channel should be applauded and supported as vigorously as the men who have been setting themselves apart for centuries.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“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

“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."

"That puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls 'the ecstasy of the privileged moment. Art, all art, as insight, as transformation, as joy. Unlike Harold Bloom, I really believe that human beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that the privileged moment exists for all of us, if we let it. Letting art is the paradox of active surrender. I have to work for art if I want art to work on me." (...)

We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector's item. Art objects.

"The cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the huge truth of a Picasso, the quieter truth of Vanessa Bell, are part of the art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that is pointless and mean. The message colored through time is not lack, but abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die."

"Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my 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. If, in the comfortable West, we have chosen to treat such energies with scepticism and contempt, then so much the worse for us.

"Art is not a little bit of evolution that late-twentieth-century city dwellers can safely do without. Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, surviving, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art.

"If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“What you fuck is much more important than how you write.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“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

“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

“Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“There are people who tell me I am cut off but to what are they connected?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“If I said to you that a reading of John Keats must entertain his tuberculosis and the fact that he was common and short, you would ignore me. You should ignore me; a writer’s work is not a chart of their sex, sexuality, sanity and physical health. We are not looking to enlist them in the navy we are simply trying to get on with the words.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“The true artist is connected. The true artist studies the past, not as a copyist or a pasticheur will study the past, those people are interested only in the final product, the art object, signed sealed and delivered to a public drugged on reproduction. The true artist is interested in the art object as an art process, the thing in being, the being of the thing, the struggle, the excitement, the energy, that have found expression in a particular way. The true artist is after the problem. The false artist wants it solved (by somebody else).”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“Money culture recognises no currency but its own. Whatever is not money, whatever is not making money, is useless to it. The entire efforts of our government as directed through our society are efforts towards making more and more money. This favours the survival of the dullest.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“Hox is a racing word: it means to hamstring a horse not so brutally that she can’t walk but cleverly so that she can’t run. Society hoxes women and pretends that God, Nature or the genepool designed them lame.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“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

“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

“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

“She was night-time and words were the dream.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“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

“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