Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
Jeanette WintersonWhat would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?
Jeanette WintersonI know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.
Jeanette WintersonWhat a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.
Jeanette WintersonI learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it's so boring - nothing's happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator's head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It's a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, "what's next?" culture - that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that.
Jeanette Winterson