Jeanette Winterson Quotes

It is silence that most needs an answering -- when I can no longer speak, hear me.

Very often history is a means of denying the past.

The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.

I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first.

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

Passion is not well bred.

Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.

Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household.

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

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.

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.

I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?

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

…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.

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.

Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.

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

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

Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.

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

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.

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

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.

That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

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

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.