Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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

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

I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.

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

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.

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

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

The free man never thinks of escape.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

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

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.

…I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one

I think we are worlds compressed into human form.

Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.

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

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

Love is an experiment ... what happens next is always surprising.

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

the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.

I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.

Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.

Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.

To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge.

…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.