And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.
Jeanette WintersonIt is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.
Jeanette WintersonWherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
Jeanette WintersonWe 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.
Jeanette WintersonYou were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.
Jeanette WintersonWhat to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
Jeanette Wintersonlive in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.
Jeanette Winterson