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I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive ...
I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself. -- Jeanette Winterson
She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave -- Jeanette Winterson
She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected. -- Jeanette Winterson
I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips. -- Jeanette Winterson
I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds. -- Jeanette Winterson
I've turned myself inside out to try and avoid what happened today. You affect me in ways I can't quantify or contain. All I can measure is the effect, and the effect is that I am out of control. -- Jeanette Winterson
Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption. -- Jeanette Winterson
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor. -- Jeanette Winterson
My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat. -- Jeanette Winterson
Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire. -- Jeanette Winterson
It is true that on bright days we are happy. That is true because the sun on the eyelids effects chemical changes in the body. The sun also diminishes the pupils to pinpricks, letting the light in less. When we can hardly see we are most likely to fall in love. -- Jeanette Winterson
Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return. -- Jeanette Winterson
And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives. -- Jeanette Winterson
There's no story that's the start of itself. -- Jeanette Winterson
To lose someone you love
Is to alter your life forever ...
The pain stops, there are new people,
But the gap never closes ...
This hole in your hear is the shape of the one you lost-
No one else can fit it. -- Jeanette Winterson
It seems obvious, doesn't it, that someone who is ignored and overlooked will expand to the point where they have to be noticed, even if the noticing is fear and disgust. -- Jeanette Winterson
When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go ... So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself. -- Jeanette Winterson
Are you like all other men after all? The poor should have no justice, just as they have no food, no decent shelter, no regular livelihood? Is that how your saviour Jesus treated the poor? -- Jeanette Winterson
We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now. -- Jeanette Winterson
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. -- Jeanette Winterson
When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry. -- Jeanette Winterson
Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom. -- Jeanette Winterson
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy. -- Jeanette Winterson
In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm. -- Jeanette Winterson
Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone. -- Jeanette Winterson
Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable - we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job. -- Jeanette Winterson
What is a memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past? -- Jeanette Winterson
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct. -- Jeanette Winterson
As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us. -- Jeanette Winterson
How long before the shouting starts? How long before the tears and the accusations and the pain? That specific stone n the stomach pain when you lose something you haven't got round to valuing? Why is the measure of love loss? -- Jeanette Winterson
She had navigated her parents' hostile waters with a child's discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. Learning to hide love. -- Jeanette Winterson
I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough. -- Jeanette Winterson
When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in. -- Jeanette Winterson
Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about. -- Jeanette Winterson
Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is. -- Jeanette Winterson
Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings. While you lay on your belly I kneaded the hard edges of your flight. You are a fallen angel but still as the angels are; body light as a dragonfly, great gold wings cut across the sun. -- Jeanette Winterson
... only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world. -- Jeanette Winterson
All the familiar things were getting different meanings. -- Jeanette Winterson
We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated. -- Jeanette Winterson
I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It's rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don't stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end. -- Jeanette Winterson
A woman who slaves for a man does not have a marriage; she has a master. -- Jeanette Winterson
We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment. -- Jeanette Winterson
Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love. -- Jeanette Winterson
All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything
the miracle
is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves. -- Jeanette Winterson
I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands. -- Jeanette Winterson
I stretched out my hands, holding the falling sun in one hand, and the climbing moon in the other, my silver and gold, my gift from life. My gift of life. My life is a hesitation in time. An opening in a cave. A gap for a word. -- Jeanette Winterson
Now if I was aping men, she'd have every right to be disgusted. As far as I was concerned, men were something you had around the place ... not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. -- Jeanette Winterson
I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? -- Jeanette Winterson
The crazy thing is that when we go to somebody's house, what's better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody's ever going to say, "Can I see the index to your Kindle?" It's so depressing and so unsexy. Sure, it's there, but nobody is going to get excited by that. -- Jeanette Winterson
How else could it be with such consuming hair? -- Jeanette Winterson
Unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. -- Jeanette Winterson
You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. -- Jeanette Winterson
I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever. -- Jeanette Winterson
I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. -- Jeanette Winterson
There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.
Revenge and Tragedy often happen together.
Forgiveness unblocks the future. (p.225) -- Jeanette Winterson
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you. -- Jeanette Winterson
The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable. -- Jeanette Winterson
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. -- Jeanette Winterson
People being encouraged to make up their own minds and think for themselves is so important. This world talks endlessly about freedom of choice, but we've never been [nothing] more than a nation of robots. Everybody is seduced by corporate culture. -- Jeanette Winterson
To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead. -- Jeanette Winterson
A bridge is a meeting place ... a possibility, a metaphor. -- Jeanette Winterson
Shakespeare," he thought as he scribbled away. "Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived. -- Jeanette Winterson
I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written. -- Jeanette Winterson
My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way. -- Jeanette Winterson
The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me? -- Jeanette Winterson
I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be. -- Jeanette Winterson
I guess I'm afraid of not being like other people. No, that's not true. I'm not afraid of not being like other people. I'm afraid I won't find anybody who doesn't mind me not being like other people. I'm not ambitious for money or power. I want to find some real way to live. -- Jeanette Winterson
Passion is not well bred. -- Jeanette Winterson
Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run? -- Jeanette Winterson
What is luck', he said, 'but the ability to exploit accidents? -- Jeanette Winterson
I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows. -- Jeanette Winterson
I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you. -- Jeanette Winterson
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. -- Jeanette Winterson
It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist. -- Jeanette Winterson
Writers always put themselves into their work. But you can't just untangle it and take it back to its source. -- Jeanette Winterson
Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way. -- Jeanette Winterson
No emotion is the final one. -- Jeanette Winterson
In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey. -- Jeanette Winterson
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead. -- Jeanette Winterson
Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught. -- Jeanette Winterson
I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day. -- Jeanette Winterson
I had to leave. She would have died for my sake. Wasn't it better for me to live a half life for her sake? -- Jeanette Winterson
If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it. -- Jeanette Winterson
Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. -- Jeanette Winterson
In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge. -- Jeanette Winterson
August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade. -- Jeanette Winterson
I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is. -- Jeanette Winterson
The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life. -- Jeanette Winterson
This is the city of uncertainty, where routes and faces look alike and are not. Death will be like that. We will forever be recognizing people we have never met. But darkness and death are not the same. One is temporary, the other is not. -- Jeanette Winterson
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? -- Jeanette Winterson
I will set you in the sky and name you. I will hide you in the earth like treasure. -- Jeanette Winterson
Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription. -- Jeanette Winterson
A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void. One will cross to the other side. The other will not return. For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And -- Jeanette Winterson
I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me. -- Jeanette Winterson
It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books - not part of me, all of me - and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be. -- Jeanette Winterson
The grey city and its lost hearts force its way between myself and my healing. -- Jeanette Winterson
Language is what stops the heart exploding. -- Jeanette Winterson
Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me. -- Jeanette Winterson
I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them. -- Jeanette Winterson
The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich. -- Jeanette Winterson
I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. -- Jeanette Winterson
The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees. -- Jeanette Winterson
I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me. -- Jeanette Winterson
Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together. -- Jeanette Winterson
Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don't give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it ... -- Jeanette Winterson
History is a madman's museum. -- Jeanette Winterson
There are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. -- Jeanette Winterson
Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves. -- Jeanette Winterson
We were not lovers, we were love. -- Jeanette Winterson
I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out. -- Jeanette Winterson
Can anyone deny that we are haunted? What is it that crouches under the myths we have made? Always the physical presence of something split off. -- Jeanette Winterson
There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and the seven seas but looking for a reason to stay. -- Jeanette Winterson
In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie. -- Jeanette Winterson
There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms. -- Jeanette Winterson
Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime. -- Jeanette Winterson
Stories are always true ... it's the facts that mislead. -- Jeanette Winterson
It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between. -- Jeanette Winterson
I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame. -- Jeanette Winterson
What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. -- Jeanette Winterson
It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose. -- Jeanette Winterson
The journey is about coming home ... There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail. (p. 220,222) -- Jeanette Winterson
I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line. -- Jeanette Winterson
We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent. -- Jeanette Winterson
I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many. -- Jeanette Winterson
The dark forest looked on fire. The trees were lit up like funeral pyres. She thought she saw bodies strapped to the trees, burning, burning, burning. -- Jeanette Winterson
My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere. -- Jeanette Winterson
I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance. -- Jeanette Winterson
Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny. -- Jeanette Winterson
Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. -- Jeanette Winterson
Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS) -- Jeanette Winterson
My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected. -- Jeanette Winterson
I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility. -- Jeanette Winterson
I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick. -- Jeanette Winterson
I put the words into a flask and flung them out to sea. Flung them far out from me, made through myself, but not myself. Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.
The world is packed tight with fools. -- Jeanette Winterson
I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse.
I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live. -- Jeanette Winterson
Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening. -- Jeanette Winterson
A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it? -- Jeanette Winterson
When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves. -- Jeanette Winterson
As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience. -- Jeanette Winterson
I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break. -- Jeanette Winterson
We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel. -- Jeanette Winterson
This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem. -- Jeanette Winterson
I'm not club-able, you see. I don't like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I'd hate to join anything, however loosely. -- Jeanette Winterson
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever. -- Jeanette Winterson
Gertrude drives on. She says, 'Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it, -- Jeanette Winterson
There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. -- Jeanette Winterson
What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain. -- Jeanette Winterson
We had killed them all without firing a shot. I prayed for the snow to fall and bury them for ever. When the snow falls you can almost believe the world is clean again. Is every snowflake different? No one knows. -- Jeanette Winterson
What I want does exist if I dare to find it. -- Jeanette Winterson
You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not. -- Jeanette Winterson
... I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt. -- Jeanette Winterson
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea. -- Jeanette Winterson
Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb -- Jeanette Winterson
The free man never thinks of escape. -- Jeanette Winterson
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid. -- Jeanette Winterson
I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken? -- Jeanette Winterson
And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn't poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss. -- Jeanette Winterson
It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise than how should I call it love? -- Jeanette Winterson
People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe. -- Jeanette Winterson
A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. -- Jeanette Winterson
Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. -- Jeanette Winterson
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough -- Jeanette Winterson
Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness. -- Jeanette Winterson
I'm telling you stories. Trust me. -- Jeanette Winterson
There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain. -- Jeanette Winterson
I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life. -- Jeanette Winterson
What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about. -- Jeanette Winterson
The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe. -- Jeanette Winterson
Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing. -- Jeanette Winterson
I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances. -- Jeanette Winterson
Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it. -- Jeanette Winterson
Don't mix your heart with your liver. -- Jeanette Winterson
Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There's no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending. -- Jeanette Winterson
We get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we shouldn't let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit. -- Jeanette Winterson
I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can. -- Jeanette Winterson
The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language. -- Jeanette Winterson
The Romantics didn't need [the bible] because they found their own fire; but almost every other quasi-revolt has gone back to it, because when the heart revolts, it wants outrageous things that cannot possibly be factual. Robes and incense and larger-than-life and miracles and heroes. -- Jeanette Winterson
The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art. -- Jeanette Winterson
I want to get to the end and feel that I've done all I could, given the limitations and given the opportunities. -- Jeanette Winterson
Infatuation. First Love. Lust.
My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals. -- Jeanette Winterson
I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt. -- Jeanette Winterson
In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one. -- Jeanette Winterson
Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people kept fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained -- Jeanette Winterson
I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No. -- Jeanette Winterson
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy? -- Jeanette Winterson
Happy ending are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future. -- Jeanette Winterson
Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation. -- Jeanette Winterson
I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed. -- Jeanette Winterson
Why is the measure of love loss? -- Jeanette Winterson
It is no use trying to assume again the state of innocence and acceptance of the animal or the child. This time it has to be conscious. To circle about in such gladness as his, is the effort of a whole lifetime. -- Jeanette Winterson
It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed? -- Jeanette Winterson
One just spends as much money as one has. Very peculiar that! You never actually have any money. You think, If I had this much money ten years ago, I would have thought I was amazingly rich, but I still manage to spend it all and not have any left. -- Jeanette Winterson
When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been. -- Jeanette Winterson
It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment. -- Jeanette Winterson
I was in those days all about the 'fuck you'. Fuck you for not recognising how great I am. I'll do it myself. -- Jeanette Winterson
The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realise the limitations of my sex. -- Jeanette Winterson
I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving. -- Jeanette Winterson
There's no dark like it. It's soft to the touch and heavy in the hands. You can open your mouth and let it sink into you 'till it makes a close ball in your belly. You can juggle with it, dodge it, swim in it. You can open it like a door. -- Jeanette Winterson
Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith. -- Jeanette Winterson
Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. -- Jeanette Winterson
He had the dog on a lead and he was still managing to be a boy with a dog and the dog was still managing to be a dog with a boy because not even a bomb gets to wipe out everything, -- Jeanette Winterson
I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. -- Jeanette Winterson
This is a quantum universe,' said Spike, 'neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene. -- Jeanette Winterson
The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely. -- Jeanette Winterson
Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off. -- Jeanette Winterson
The people who decided in their wisdom that we're all going to go over to ebooks, they are not readers. These are technical people. These are people who think that somehow this is progress. It isn't. It's regressive. -- Jeanette Winterson
The only selfish life is a timid one. -- Jeanette Winterson
What the myths say, is that you have to be the hero of your own life. You're the one who has to take charge of who you are, you're the one who has to take control. And also, you're the one who can bring something to the community. -- Jeanette Winterson
Writers are often exiles, outsiders, runaways and castaways. -- Jeanette Winterson
To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road. -- Jeanette Winterson
Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same. -- Jeanette Winterson
In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance. -- Jeanette Winterson
Manchester is in the south of the north of England.
Its spirit has a contrariness in it
a south and north bound up together
at once untamed and unmetropolitan; at the same time, connected and wordly. -- Jeanette Winterson
I had thought about everything carefully before I had agreed to him. I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated; his heart and mine. -- Jeanette Winterson
Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail. -- Jeanette Winterson
I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older. -- Jeanette Winterson
This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in. -- Jeanette Winterson
Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible. -- Jeanette Winterson
What is 'no'? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the 'yes'. -- Jeanette Winterson
If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away. -- Jeanette Winterson
When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household. -- Jeanette Winterson
What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate. -- Jeanette Winterson
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home. -- Jeanette Winterson
As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them. -- Jeanette Winterson
We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes. -- Jeanette Winterson
As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself. -- Jeanette Winterson
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully. -- Jeanette Winterson
There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past. -- Jeanette Winterson
Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels. -- Jeanette Winterson
By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's. -- Jeanette Winterson
Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result. -- Jeanette Winterson
Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions? -- Jeanette Winterson
One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone. -- Jeanette Winterson
We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie. -- Jeanette Winterson
A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros. -- Jeanette Winterson
My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough. -- Jeanette Winterson
Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood? -- Jeanette Winterson
You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. -- Jeanette Winterson
I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak. -- Jeanette Winterson
Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants. -- Jeanette Winterson
I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it. -- Jeanette Winterson
It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is. -- Jeanette Winterson
The body was there, the woman inside disappeared. -- Jeanette Winterson
Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations. -- Jeanette Winterson
I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices under water. -- Jeanette Winterson
I would eat my way into perdition to taste you. -- Jeanette Winterson
And if you have found your voice, you can be heard -- Jeanette Winterson
The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin. -- Jeanette Winterson
I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people. -- Jeanette Winterson
I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking. -- Jeanette Winterson
Naked is the best disguise. -- Jeanette Winterson
The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting. -- Jeanette Winterson
When you are a solitary kid you find an imaginary friend. -- Jeanette Winterson
My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o'clock. Perhaps that's why I try and have my crises in the evening. -- Jeanette Winterson
Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative. -- Jeanette Winterson
I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you. -- Jeanette Winterson
What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention? -- Jeanette Winterson
Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late! -- Jeanette Winterson
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. -- Jeanette Winterson
Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. -- Jeanette Winterson
Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. -- Jeanette Winterson
If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me. -- Jeanette Winterson
You can always tell a good woman by her sandwiches, -- Jeanette Winterson
And what is memory but a rope slung across time? -- Jeanette Winterson
The key to happiness ... is tolerance of those who do not do as you do. -- Jeanette Winterson
For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so. -- Jeanette Winterson
Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world. -- Jeanette Winterson
Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. -- Jeanette Winterson
We're in a strange situation where people either don't read at all or they read a lot. There's a huge gap in between. That's something that would be good to bridge so it doesn't have to be one thing or the other. Books could be part of life in a more relaxed way. I'd like to see that. -- Jeanette Winterson
Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything! -- Jeanette Winterson
I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. -- Jeanette Winterson
My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion ... -- Jeanette Winterson
It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. -- Jeanette Winterson
You've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening. -- Jeanette Winterson
I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not. -- Jeanette Winterson
Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy. -- Jeanette Winterson
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own. -- Jeanette Winterson
We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content. -- Jeanette Winterson
You're drunk."
"That's right I am. I'm fifty-three and I'm as wild as a Welshman with a leek up his arse. Fifty-three. Old slag Gail. What right has she to poke her nose into your shining armour? That's what you're thinking isn't it honey? -- Jeanette Winterson
More than sex. More than money. You know, life is not endless is it? Cash, cars, cocaine, and girls. It's more than that. And there is a spiritual dimension to people ... we are driven to want something more. -- Jeanette Winterson
Y'know, Nature's unpredictable
that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision. -- Jeanette Winterson
Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don't matter a bit. -- Jeanette Winterson
Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead. -- Jeanette Winterson
Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't. -- Jeanette Winterson
Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?'
Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.'
'How can I escape my fate?'
'You must choose your destiny. -- Jeanette Winterson
If the demons lie within they travel with you.
Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception. -- Jeanette Winterson
No one else was there, with the weather like this. If I still lived there, I'd be indoors too. It's a visitor's privilege to be foolish. -- Jeanette Winterson
If the demons lived anywhere it was here. -- Jeanette Winterson
In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go. -- Jeanette Winterson
Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you're getting old. -- Jeanette Winterson
The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was. -- Jeanette Winterson
I felt miserable. When Keats felt miserable he always put on a clean shirt. But he was a poet. -- Jeanette Winterson
It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own. -- Jeanette Winterson
There is different sorts of treachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. -- Jeanette Winterson
I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying. -- Jeanette Winterson
I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime. -- Jeanette Winterson
You are a pool of clear water where the light plays -- Jeanette Winterson
I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way. -- Jeanette Winterson
Why be happy when you could be normal ? -- Jeanette Winterson
I can't stay here. These wars will never end. Even if we get home, there'll be another war. I thought he'd end wars for ever, that's what he said. One more, he said, one more and then there'll be peace and it's always been one more. I want to stop now. -- Jeanette Winterson
We live as best we may in a world of worms. -- Jeanette Winterson
I love her."
"Then you do not love the Lord."
"Yes, I love both of them."
"You cannot."
"I do. -- Jeanette Winterson
I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. -- Jeanette Winterson
Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour. -- Jeanette Winterson
Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her. -- Jeanette Winterson
Life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It's not really random at all. -- Jeanette Winterson
Don't you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn't the mirror hostile enough? -- Jeanette Winterson
In the cell was a rack, a winch, a furnace, a set of branding irons, a pot for melting wax, nails of different lengths. A thumbscrew, a pair of flesh-tongs, heavy tweezers, a set of surgical instruments, a series of small metal trays, ropes, wire, preparations of quicklime, a hood and a blindfold. -- Jeanette Winterson
When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary. -- Jeanette Winterson
I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here. -- Jeanette Winterson
The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking. -- Jeanette Winterson
I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings. -- Jeanette Winterson
It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong. -- Jeanette Winterson
Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun. -- Jeanette Winterson
We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. If was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it. -- Jeanette Winterson
Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally. -- Jeanette Winterson
The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. -- Jeanette Winterson
Today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected. -- Jeanette Winterson
You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue. -- Jeanette Winterson
My mother has often been labelled as strange but that's because she says things that people can't possibly believe. Mostly she's right. -- Jeanette Winterson
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
I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl. -- Jeanette Winterson
Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. -- Jeanette Winterson
Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed. -- Jeanette Winterson
There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own. -- Jeanette Winterson
The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world -- Jeanette Winterson
There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. -- Jeanette Winterson
My experience has been that times always ends. In theory, you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the religious and romantics are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch. -- Jeanette Winterson
Cheer up ye saints of God,
There's nothing to worry about;
Nothing to make you feel afraid,
Nothing to make you doubt;
Remember Jesus saves you;
So why not trust him and shout,
You'll be sorry you worried at all, tomorrow,
morning. -- Jeanette Winterson
I need the dark places to get outside of common sense -- Jeanette Winterson
Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. -- Jeanette Winterson
It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband. -- Jeanette Winterson
What they held was already inside me, and together we could get away. And standing over the smoldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. "Fuck it," I thought, "I can write my own. -- Jeanette Winterson
There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night. -- Jeanette Winterson
Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love. -- Jeanette Winterson
Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. -- Jeanette Winterson
The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live. -- Jeanette Winterson
Mrs. Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do. -- Jeanette Winterson
our outside loo, known as the Betty, was a good loo; whitewashed and compact with a flashlight hanging behind the door. I smuggled books in there to read them in secret, claiming constipation. -- Jeanette Winterson
Their throats were bare for God. -- Jeanette Winterson
I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do. -- Jeanette Winterson
Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over. -- Jeanette Winterson
It was very bad for me that my deafness happened at around the same time as I discovered my clitoris. -- Jeanette Winterson
I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. -- Jeanette Winterson
And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.
Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time. -- Jeanette Winterson
What he told himself on those sea-soaked nights ... Others joined in and it was discovered that every light had a story-no, every light was a story. And the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning. -- Jeanette Winterson
I saw a lot of working class men and women - myself included - living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the church... The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning. -- Jeanette Winterson
What is unconscious does not speak and that includes the hidden parts of himself. -- Jeanette Winterson
Life was a pre-death experience. -- Jeanette Winterson
Fools stay in love. I am a fool. -- Jeanette Winterson
The best language is always found in books because it's considered. It's a high language. Sometimes, it is complex and difficult. It's empowering and offers a way to speak about yourself that you don't have if all you are doing is reading the newspaper and watching TV. -- Jeanette Winterson
Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind. -- Jeanette Winterson
I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it. -- Jeanette Winterson
What you risk reveals what you value. -- Jeanette Winterson
People say the magic has gone out of the moon now that someone's stood on it. I don't think so. It would take more than a man's foot to steal the moon. -- Jeanette Winterson
Knowing that books are something that is hidden, that almost has that alchemical quality to it. There is a secret society in here, and if you belong to it, you'll be able to transform your lead into gold. I have that rather magical sense about books - that they do, somehow, have special powers. -- Jeanette Winterson
Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one -- Jeanette Winterson
Being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. -- Jeanette Winterson
Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved. -- Jeanette Winterson
travelling the world and the seven seas -- Jeanette Winterson
Everyone knows a homosexual is no closer to being a woman than a rhinoceros. -- Jeanette Winterson
Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.'
'And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead. -- Jeanette Winterson
I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all. -- Jeanette Winterson
Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python. -- Jeanette Winterson
Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'.
It might as well have said '27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON'. -- Jeanette Winterson
It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest. -- Jeanette Winterson
Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table. -- Jeanette Winterson
Babies are frightening
raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. -- Jeanette Winterson
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does. -- Jeanette Winterson
There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. -- Jeanette Winterson
I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I. -- Jeanette Winterson
If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us. -- Jeanette Winterson
She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy. -- Jeanette Winterson
Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other. -- Jeanette Winterson
Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg
it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it. -- Jeanette Winterson
I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously. -- Jeanette Winterson
My mother's eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky. -- Jeanette Winterson
However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience. -- Jeanette Winterson
I've thought of killing myself so many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence. -- Jeanette Winterson
Our contradictions are never so to ourselves. -- Jeanette Winterson
I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue? -- Jeanette Winterson
Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited. -- Jeanette Winterson
Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears? -- Jeanette Winterson
Something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown. -- Jeanette Winterson
The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off his body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine. -- Jeanette Winterson
We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify. -- Jeanette Winterson
The past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance. -- Jeanette Winterson
I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice. -- Jeanette Winterson
This is the city of disguises. -- Jeanette Winterson
I love life. Life is too precious to me not to live it fully. -- Jeanette Winterson
Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine. -- Jeanette Winterson
I have no idea what happens next -- Jeanette Winterson
I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks. -- Jeanette Winterson
gifts - that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands. -- Jeanette Winterson
I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped. -- Jeanette Winterson
Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.
We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. -- Jeanette Winterson
Congratulations on your Engagement'.
But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. -- Jeanette Winterson
She was a monster, but she was my monster. -- Jeanette Winterson
I kissed her and forgot death. -- Jeanette Winterson
She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. -- Jeanette Winterson
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it. -- Jeanette Winterson
I tried to copy my parents, as monkeys do, but they were trying to copy me, looking to the child for the energy and hope they had long since lost. -- Jeanette Winterson
Yes, the past is another country, but once that we can visit and once there we can bring back the things we need. -- Jeanette Winterson
Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise. -- Jeanette Winterson
Bridges join but they also separate. -- Jeanette Winterson
I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. Just on the other side of creativity is the nuthouse - and I often notice people looking at me strangely when I am talking out loud, but there is no other way. -- Jeanette Winterson
Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar. -- Jeanette Winterson
There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream. -- Jeanette Winterson
I can't do it. I've been here before and it's not a room with a view. The only power I have is the negative power of withdrawal. If I don't withdraw I have no power at all. A relationship where one person has no power or negative power, isn't a relationship, it's the bond between master and slave. -- Jeanette Winterson
One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life. -- Jeanette Winterson
The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform. -- Jeanette Winterson
The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive. -- Jeanette Winterson
I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder. Theyall want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That's not the kind of heroism they enjoy. -- Jeanette Winterson
In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'
Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.
Feel for yourself. -- Jeanette Winterson
Moon's gravitational pull means that earth doesn't wobble too much. Scientists call it obliquity. The moon holds us fast. -- Jeanette Winterson
I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day.
A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone. -- Jeanette Winterson
History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries. -- Jeanette Winterson
Every new beginning prompts a return. -- Jeanette Winterson
Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know. -- Jeanette Winterson
Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me. -- Jeanette Winterson
Here's my life - I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed. -- Jeanette Winterson
Whelks are strange and comforting.
They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly.
But they have a strong sense of personal dignity.
Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar there is something noble about a whelk.
Which cannot be said for everybody. -- Jeanette Winterson
Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things. -- Jeanette Winterson
Trust me, I'm telling you stories. -- Jeanette Winterson
There are two questions: where have you come from, and where are you going? But the brain doesn't have separate regions for the past and future; only the present is differentiated by the brain.
We split time into three parts. The brain, it seems, splits it twice only: now, and not now. -- Jeanette Winterson
I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it. -- Jeanette Winterson
Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur. -- Jeanette Winterson
We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it. -- Jeanette Winterson
To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her,
or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love -- Jeanette Winterson
But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that. -- Jeanette Winterson
The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness. -- Jeanette Winterson
I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn't I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts. -- Jeanette Winterson
The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to. -- Jeanette Winterson
I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people. -- Jeanette Winterson
The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. -- Jeanette Winterson
My mother is very like William Blake, she has visions and dreams and she cannot always distinguish a flea's head from a king. Luckily she can't paint. -- Jeanette Winterson
Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. -- Jeanette Winterson
Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it. -- Jeanette Winterson
There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies -- Jeanette Winterson
The point about food is that a lot of it used to be left-overs and recycling. -- Jeanette Winterson
Look at all that rubbish," she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all.
"They're taking it away," I said.
"Where to?" she said. "It just gets moved around dearie, that's all. -- Jeanette Winterson
For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it. -- Jeanette Winterson
Everyone assumed it had to be some sort of biography, because if you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you're a man, you're actually doing some post-modern play on the novel, some critique on identity with lots of references to Foucault. -- Jeanette Winterson
Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl. -- Jeanette Winterson
Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose. -- Jeanette Winterson
I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings. -- Jeanette Winterson
Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet. -- Jeanette Winterson
Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living. -- Jeanette Winterson
It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off. -- Jeanette Winterson
A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. -- Jeanette Winterson
They say every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember. -- Jeanette Winterson
If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war. -- Jeanette Winterson
Atlas gazed out, as he always did, into infinite space, wishing he could be part of it, even for one hour. -- Jeanette Winterson
There are voices and they must be heard. -- Jeanette Winterson
We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes. -- Jeanette Winterson
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you. -- Jeanette Winterson
Let me read to you," said Roger Nowell. "It is a night for reading. -- Jeanette Winterson
You are stubborn,' said Roger Nowell. 'I am not tame,' said Alice Nutter. -- Jeanette Winterson
Under the night rug, the star rug, moon as lantern, man in the moon watching over us, dog star at his heels, we lay. -- Jeanette Winterson
Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap. -- Jeanette Winterson
I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. -- Jeanette Winterson
I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex. -- Jeanette Winterson
He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken. -- Jeanette Winterson
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking? -- Jeanette Winterson
But, Mistress, do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you. -- Jeanette Winterson
What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing? -- Jeanette Winterson
He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love. -- Jeanette Winterson
Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. -- Jeanette Winterson
We were in Ireland. Was there ever a country so damp? I had to wring out my mind to think clearly. I was a morning mist of confusion. -- Jeanette Winterson
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. -- Jeanette Winterson
Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture -- Jeanette Winterson
If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes. -- Jeanette Winterson
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person. -- Jeanette Winterson
A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under. -- Jeanette Winterson
This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer. -- Jeanette Winterson
It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction. -- Jeanette Winterson
If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, 'more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. 'It's all in the mind. -- Jeanette Winterson
It is necessary to distinguish the chalk circle from the stone wall. -- Jeanette Winterson
It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening. -- Jeanette Winterson
Do you fall in love often?
Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. -- Jeanette Winterson
I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium. -- Jeanette Winterson
Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine? -- Jeanette Winterson
What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning? -- Jeanette Winterson
And if the road leads nowhere?' He shrugged. 'Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere. -- Jeanette Winterson
Hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion. Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. -- Jeanette Winterson
The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown. -- Jeanette Winterson
Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door. -- Jeanette Winterson
Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets. -- Jeanette Winterson
Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there. -- Jeanette Winterson
I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me. -- Jeanette Winterson
Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish. -- Jeanette Winterson
The power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work. -- Jeanette Winterson
When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day. -- Jeanette Winterson
Perhaps it is true that the world is made new again every day but our minds are not. The clamp that holds me will not let me go. -- Jeanette Winterson
It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes. -- Jeanette Winterson
In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead. -- Jeanette Winterson
I was hungry, but I was nervous too. You were so new and I didn't want to frighten you away. I didn't want to frighten myself away. -- Jeanette Winterson
There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit. -- Jeanette Winterson
If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going. -- Jeanette Winterson
The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world. -- Jeanette Winterson
She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it. -- Jeanette Winterson
Life is so simple when you're just doing your job. -- Jeanette Winterson
When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling. -- Jeanette Winterson
The night seems more temporary than the day, especially to lovers, and it also seems more uncertain. In this way it sums up our lives, which are uncertain and temporary. We forget about that in the day. In the day we go on for ever. -- Jeanette Winterson
With faith, all things are possible. -- Jeanette Winterson
Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was. -- Jeanette Winterson
The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own. -- Jeanette Winterson
I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult. -- Jeanette Winterson
I have had a lot to put up with," she said, looking meaningfully at me. "I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day. -- Jeanette Winterson
Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality. -- Jeanette Winterson
The important things. Where should I find them? In the detail, like God? In the risk, like the Devil? -- Jeanette Winterson
Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. -- Jeanette Winterson
I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping. -- Jeanette Winterson
And I notice too often that the most unfeeling of people relieve their shuttered hearts by cooing over babies, who when grown , will be the same people exploited or ignored. -- Jeanette Winterson
She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice. -- Jeanette Winterson
The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. -- Jeanette Winterson
He doesn't take a photo or a video because he wants to remember - by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can't capture. -- Jeanette Winterson
It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power. -- Jeanette Winterson
I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; stella maris of the upper air. -- Jeanette Winterson
It is the nature of walls that they should fall. -- Jeanette Winterson
I was in danger of drowning, and nobody lost at sea worries about whether the spar they cling to is made of elm or oak. -- Jeanette Winterson
I'm not a quitter. -- Jeanette Winterson
When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. -- Jeanette Winterson
Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries. -- Jeanette Winterson
I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted. -- Jeanette Winterson
We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who's kidding whom? -- Jeanette Winterson
I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever. -- Jeanette Winterson
And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed. -- Jeanette Winterson
I think we still believe that ambition is for boys. -- Jeanette Winterson
To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown. -- Jeanette Winterson
Time is a boomerang, not an arrow. -- Jeanette Winterson
I discover that grief means living with someone who is not there. -- Jeanette Winterson
What other places are there in the world than those discovered on a lover's body? -- Jeanette Winterson
Don't lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone's little home. -- Jeanette Winterson
History is not a suicide note
it is a record of our survival. -- Jeanette Winterson
Eating was easy. Thinking was hard. -- Jeanette Winterson
I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked. -- Jeanette Winterson
Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth. -- Jeanette Winterson
Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself. -- Jeanette Winterson
I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject. -- Jeanette Winterson
The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost. -- Jeanette Winterson
Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? -- Jeanette Winterson
Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement. -- Jeanette Winterson
The true nature of the world is energy not mass. -- Jeanette Winterson
A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. -- Jeanette Winterson
I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. -- Jeanette Winterson
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back? -- Jeanette Winterson
Reading is a rendezvous with your soul. -- Jeanette Winterson
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. -- Jeanette Winterson
I never cared about money. -- Jeanette Winterson
moss that is concentrating on being green. -- Jeanette Winterson
Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again. -- Jeanette Winterson
The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self. -- Jeanette Winterson
I don't believe in happy endings. -- Jeanette Winterson
I am always wondering about love. -- Jeanette Winterson