I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?
Jeanette WintersonMore than sex. More than money. You know, life is not endless is it? Cash, cars, cocaine, and girls. It's more than that. And there is a spiritual dimension to people...we are driven to want something more.
Jeanette WintersonHopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.
Jeanette WintersonI know I've had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn't matter if I couldn't make it speak to other people.
Jeanette WintersonWe don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.
Jeanette WintersonI had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.
Jeanette Winterson