Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Women always bring it back to the personal, ' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.''And men never do, ' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.

They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.

Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture

the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

Be with someone you don't want to be without.

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.

You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.

If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.

I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical.

I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them.

If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me.

I want to touch you.''And if you did touch me, what then?''I would find a language of beginning.

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. And the wound will take you there.

What you think is the heart might well be another organ.

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

When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

I can change the story. I am the story.

...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.

We live as best we may in a world of worms.

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.

One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone.

Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!

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.

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.

you act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.

There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together.Forgiveness unblocks the future." (p.225)

The journey is about coming home....There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail." (p. 220, 222)

If the demons lived anywhere it was here.

I have ridden out all the storms, ” said Shakespeare, “even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

Shakespeare, ” he thought as he scribbled away. “Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.

What is luck', he said, 'but the ability to exploit accidents?

There's no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear.

You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

gifts — that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.

Why doesn't she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93, 000, 000 miles away and I can't get warm... She won't be cold. She has the sun inside her.

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

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

I came to this city to escape.

The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.