Jeanette Winterson Quotes

As your lover describes you, so you are.. Jeanette Winterson

As your lover describes you, so you are.

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.. Jeanette Winterson

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.. Jeanette Winterson

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

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.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is

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.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.. Jeanette Winterson

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

Passion out of passion's obstacles.. Jeanette Winterson

Passion out of passion's obstacles.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun.

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.. Jeanette Winterson

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.

Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.

I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.

Why is the measure of love loss?. Jeanette Winterson

Why is the measure of love loss?

In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'
Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.
Feel for yourself.

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.. Jeanette

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this:

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.

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

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

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.. Jeanette Winterson

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

He: What’s the matter with you?

Me: Nothing.

Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

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

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

I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. 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?

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

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

جمع الكتب هو استحواذ، ومرض، وإدمان، وفتنة، وقدر. هو ليس بهواية. من يقوم بذلك فلأنه عليه ال

Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.. Jeanette Winterson

Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.

We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it.

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing..

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.

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

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

If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be

If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.

For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.

Let me read to you,” said Roger Nowell. “It is a night for reading.

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays. Jeanette Winterson

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays

They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

I have had a lot to put up with," she said, looking meaningfully at me. "I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught.

He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love.

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

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

My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion . . .

Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living.

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

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.

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

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day.

A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

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

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

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.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.

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

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.

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.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

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 always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.

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