Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not.

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.

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.

It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

The wider we read the freer we become.

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.

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

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

The past is magnetic. It draws us in.

History is a madman's museum.

Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

Passion out of passion's obstacles.

Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.Or the people who found Atlantis.

Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny.

There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.

Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?

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

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run?

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?

There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, "David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now, ' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?