Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.

If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.

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.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

Life was a pre-death experience.

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.

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

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

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.

I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

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

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

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

In this life, you have to be your own hero.

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?

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.

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

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

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

If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.

We are all historians in our small way.

As your lover describes you, so you are.

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

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.

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

How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.

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.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

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.

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.

What I want does exist if I dare to find it.

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.

We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.

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