Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

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.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

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.

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

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.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

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.

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.

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

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

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.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved.

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

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

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

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.

Why is the measure of love loss?

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?

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.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

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

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

What you risk reveals what you value.

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

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.

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil. Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

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?

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.

Do it from the heart or not at all.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

Life is so simple when you're just doing your job.

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.

But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

..to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

After every ''victory'' you have more enemies.

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.