Jeanette Winterson Quotes & Sayings

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves ... )
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality is truth. — Jeanette Winterson

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door. — 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

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

Let me read to you," said Roger Nowell. "It is a night for reading. — Jeanette Winterson

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible. — Jeanette Winterson

Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my own. — Jeanette Winterson

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 me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you. — Jeanette Winterson

The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realise the limitations of my sex. — Jeanette Winterson

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people. — Jeanette Winterson

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys. — Jeanette Winterson

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all. — 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

Everyone's talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don't think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.
If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that's what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren't going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language. — Jeanette Winterson

When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as a result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tight-rope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change. — Jeanette Winterson

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. — Jeanette Winterson

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past. — Jeanette Winterson

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous — Jeanette Winterson

I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end. — Jeanette Winterson

Wallowing is sex for depressives. — Jeanette Winterson

There's no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take is seriously. — Jeanette Winterson

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown. — Jeanette Winterson

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being. — Jeanette Winterson

Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. — Jeanette Winterson

The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. — 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

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

Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past.
Of time to come, she says much, but who listens? — 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

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel. — 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

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

It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between. — Jeanette Winterson

Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person. — Jeanette Winterson

The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art. — 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

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

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame. — Jeanette Winterson

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. — 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

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected. — 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

It was a long story, and like most of the stories in the world, never finished. There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does. — Jeanette Winterson

You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue. — 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

Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you're getting old. — 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

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top with the phone saying 'Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine.' The trunks shudder — 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

It takes much longer to leave the psychic place than the physical place. (p.120) — 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

Great control and great discipline are necessary when you reach your own editing stage of the book, but in the early stages you have to be prepared to let anything happen and to get it wrong or go off track. The development of a character is not smooth or simple - it is as tricky as meeting someone new whom you would like to know better. — Jeanette Winterson

When you are a solitary kid you find an imaginary friend. — 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

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

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

I remember once walking out hand in hand with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we'd be rich forever. We filled our pockets and our hair. We were rolled in gold. We ran through the field laughing and our legs and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or golden gods. He kissed my feet, the boy I was with, and when he smiled, he had a gold tooth.
It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young. — Jeanette Winterson

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar. — Jeanette Winterson

I'm telling you stories. Trust me. — Jeanette Winterson

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain. — Jeanette Winterson

You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.'
I answered you: 'Isolde.'
Isolde. The world became a word. — Jeanette Winterson

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break. — Jeanette Winterson

There is a bit [in Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?] where I talk about 'keeping the heart awake to love and beauty.' That's very difficult in our world, even when things are going well. It's not a world with much room for love and beauty. The daily news is [filled with] everything that goes wrong in our world, and everything horrible and unpleasant. I think that saturates your mind with negativity. I really think we need something to counteract that. I don't think it's Pollyanna or sentimental to focus on the ways we support one another on the micro level.
(from "It is the Imagination that Counts") — Jeanette Winterson

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days. — Jeanette Winterson

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

She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected. — Jeanette Winterson

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy? — Jeanette Winterson

Very often history is a means of denying the past. — Jeanette Winterson

Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn't our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets — 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

I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical. — Jeanette Winterson

If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you. — Jeanette Winterson

I asked him why he was a priest, and he said if you have to work for anyone, an absentee boss is best. — Jeanette Winterson

We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in ... It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can. — Jeanette Winterson

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes. — Jeanette Winterson

A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you. — Jeanette Winterson

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots ... but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement. — Jeanette Winterson

The point about food is that a lot of it used to be left-overs and recycling. — Jeanette Winterson

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. — Jeanette Winterson

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior - benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.
'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.'
'Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.
'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course - as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness. — Jeanette Winterson

You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which? — 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

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

Life ... we understand it differently at different stages. It's what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference. — Jeanette Winterson

Don't mix your heart with your liver. — 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 kissed her and forgot death. — 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 needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. — 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

Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will probably be all right, I'm told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they? — Jeanette Winterson

He: What's the matter with you?
Me: Nothing.
Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, but there was nothing the matter with her. — Jeanette Winterson

Words like passion and ecstasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try to turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell os a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. — 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

Only the impossible is worth the effort. — Jeanette Winterson

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write. — Jeanette Winterson

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. — Jeanette Winterson

When the children of Israel left Egypt, they were guided by the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night. For them, this did not seem to be a problem. For me, it was an enormous problem. The pillar of cloud was a fog, perplexing and impossible. I didn't understand the ground rules. The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their version of the facts — Jeanette Winterson

There is talk in the village that there is more in these sewers than sewerage. Yes, I say, Yes. But not only these sewers. There is more in your heart than can be spoken. More in your eyes than you will tell. More in the mind of you than anyone can know. More in the night than darkness. More in the river than can be dredged. What more ? The hate, envy, malice, greed, stupidity and evil that lie under the floor of everything.
If I have secrets so do you. — Jeanette Winterson

He had seen the vision of perfect heroism and, for a fleeting moment, the vision of perfect peace. He sought it again, to balance him. He was a warrior who longed to grow herbs. — Jeanette Winterson