#language

The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs. ↗

— Arthur E. Waite

#offers #other #signs #speaks #symbolism

In 'A Royal Affair' I had to learn to act like a queen and learned Danish. It's so much different to act in another language. It's the nuances in the words. ↗

— Alicia Vikander

#affair #another #danish #different #had

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. ↗

— Derek Walcott

#english language #imagination #itself #language #nobody

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand. ↗

— Alice Walker

#confuses #different #different points #directions #getting

Music, as many people have said, is the universal language. Of course points are made which make you think about things, but ultimately it makes you feel. And that's why people remember more songs that have meant something during their life than films. They start to define periods in your life, and that's kind of the beauty of it. ↗

— Scott Weiland

#beauty #course #define #during #feel

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight. ↗

— Arabella Weir

#both #children #coffee #cut #degrees

On the contrary a film can promote the idea of change without any political message whatsoever but in its form and language can tell people that they can change their lives and contribute to progressive changes in the world. ↗

— Wim Wenders

#change #changes #contrary #contribute #film

Language is memory and metaphor. ↗

— Storm Jameson

#memory #metaphor

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce. ↗

— Robert Fitzgerald

#finds #happens #language #more #oneself

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent. Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? 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 language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#narrative #silence #storytelling #trauma #truth