J Winterson Quotes & Sayings

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

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that. — Jeanette Winterson

Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another? — Jeanette Winterson

It works because the principle of personal space is always the same, whether you're fending off an elemental or someone's bad mood. It's a force field around yourself, and as long as our imagining powers are weak, it's useful to have something to remind us. — Jeanette Winterson

I have flown the distance of your body from side to side of your ivory coast. I know the forests where I can rest and feed. I have mapped you with my naked eye and stored you out of sight.
The millions of cells that make up your tissues are plotted on my retina. Night flying I know exactly where I am. Your body is my landing strip. — Jeanette Winterson

When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not. — Jeanette Winterson

Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness. — Jeanette Winterson

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it. — Jeanette Winterson

Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny. — 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

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

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? — 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 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

I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all. — Jeanette Winterson

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? — Jeanette Winterson

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed. — Jeanette Winterson

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience ... — Jeanette Winterson

The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I. — Jeanette Winterson

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise. — Jeanette Winterson

He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife. — 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 am always wondering about love. — Jeanette Winterson

HE: History has no smell.
ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it?
HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present. — 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

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

The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents — 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

Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land. — Jeanette Winterson

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain. — Jeanette Winterson