Jeanette Winterson Quotes

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Language is memory and metaphor.

[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.