Youโll get over itโฆโ Itโs the clichรฉs that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You donโt get over it because โitโ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
Jeanette WintersonLondon is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
Jeanette WintersonSometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.
Jeanette WintersonWhat is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.
Jeanette WintersonI know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies โ unconscious strategies โ to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too โ sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life. It takes courage to feel the feeling โ and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person.
Jeanette Winterson