Yes, we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check their diary when we arrange to meet.
Jeanette WintersonWhere did love begin?What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary,dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you? In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts.
Jeanette WintersonWhere you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
Jeanette WintersonIn the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.
Jeanette WintersonTwo things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.
Jeanette Winterson