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Winterson Quotes & Sayings

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Top Winterson Quotes

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

The important things. Where should I find them? In the detail, like God? In the risk, like the Devil? — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I tried to build an igloo out of orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn't have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I don't believe in happy endings. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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 and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.
I started to cry. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

We're here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it's all part of the paradox. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

She was a monster, but she was my monster. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Energy cannot be lost, only transformed; where do the words go? — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I am always wondering about love. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Their throats were bare for God. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

She looked at me.
There was a second
the kind that holds the whole world ... — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse - there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
Love is an intervention. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Passion is for holidays, not homecoming. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day."

"You'll get older," said my mother, "that's what happens."

"Then what happens?"

"You won't be able to find the treasure."

"Will I be too old to look for it?"

"No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I'm really a flight animal. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

There's this world,' she banged the wall graphically, 'and there's this world,' she thumped her chest. 'If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Women are just planets that attract the wrong species. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I'm not a quitter. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

And here's the shock
when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, you do not experience great joy and huge energy.
You are unhappy. Things get worse.
It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.
And then all the cowards come out and say, 'See, I told you so.'
In fact, they told you nothing. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

The grey city and its lost hearts force its way between myself and my healing. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By 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

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage. — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

I have ridden out all the storms," said Shakespeare, "even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins ... — Jeanette Winterson

Winterson Quotes By Jeanette Winterson

The true nature of the world is energy not mass. — Jeanette Winterson