I had lines inside 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. . Jeanette Winterson
About This Quote

Words are powerful and can be used in many ways. You can use them to heal or to damage. You can use them to communicate or to ignore what others are saying. There are lines of poetry that explain how words can be used in unhealthy ways, but there are also lines of poetry that explain how words can be used in the healing process.

You are who you are because of your experiences, but if words are not used to describe those experiences, then the person will never know what they are missing out on. With language, you can make up your own stories, which is what Alice Miller did. Alice Miller was a child psychologist who wrote her own story about her childhood which she called "The Drama of the Gifted Child" that described her childhood as being "damaged." She did this by writing about "the rupture reality makes on the imagination." It was her ability to write about these feelings of hers that helped her heal from what she had experienced in her childhood.

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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More Quotes By Jeanette Winterson
  1. You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap...

  2. As your lover describes you, so you are.

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  4. What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop...

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