Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Their throats were bare for God.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

I have no idea what happens next.

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.

Trust your creativity.

If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.

To create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement.

I don't believe in happy endings.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there

Only the impossible is worth the effort.

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction--don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

What you eat is the most political thing you do every day

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.

Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.

It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

There are voices and they must be heard.

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.

It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.

I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.

I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.

I want to get to the end and feel that I've done all I could, given the limitations and given the opportunities.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant.

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can.

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.

Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.