language

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can't describe how bad you feel, but joy on the other hand is far too divine for human language.

The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.

Looking at what 'foreplay' is, 'sexual intercourse' is a game.

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__ silent twin. There are so many things that we can__ 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.

Writing poetry is like having sex with the universe and the language is just a condom.

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside.But what is it, a row of trees? It__ just trees.Row and the plural trees aren__ things, they__e names.

Language is a ladder that always falls short of reality.

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory__he colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements__he sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them.

Every language has its own word for the sun, but the sun us always the same.

I know you do not understand what I am trying to tell you; I know you do not understand, because it is the thing that goes deepest into my heart, and there are no words as deep down as that. How can I make you know the reality of it? The world has spattered us all over with words, with cant phrases, with sarcasm, and with fulsome flattery. The world has been so officiously eager to explain for us the thing we mean and the worth of the thing that now, when we try to speak, our meaning is veiled, concealed, smothered, by the hideous volubility of facile expression. How can it have any reality for you when you hear only words about it?

By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer present. In this loss of language, the word gives way to the image as the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic regime of conformity - the hyper-real, the omnipresent image. Language, real place gives way to numerical code, the real virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion of certainty in technological perfection.

Since language produces meaning within an enclosed system, there is always a built-in untranslatability, which national languages began to deliberately pursue. The process added to the creation of an untranslatable "reality" that can be expresses only in a particular language. It also added to the discovery of untranslatable "truths.

difference, distance, absence and seperation lie 'at the heart' of meaning, being and reality

Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God.

In reality, love is fluid; it__ a verb, not a noun.

Language and reality are kept strictly apart__eality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn__ care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn__.