Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.

It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.

In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.

Slightest accidents open up new worlds.

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?

No emotion is the final one.

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.

Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.

The only selfish life is a timid one.

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.

A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.

There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.

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.

Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.

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

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.

What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

There's so little wonder left in the world because we've seen everything one way or another'.

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.

The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art.

Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.

If there's one thing I can't stand it's a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.

A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros.

It is the nature of walls that they should fall.

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

I never cared about money.

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.

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.

Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings.

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?

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

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

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.

This is a quantum universe ... neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.

The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness.

It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

Passion is for holidays, not homecoming.

There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit.

Today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected.