Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.

Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

There's a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn't seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books are activities that you do after-hours, rather than things that are at the heart of life. That's a huge change.

i realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy -speed of light power- to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr.right will make the world new.

The free man never thinks of escape.

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?

If you don't educate people well, then you're going to have a lot of violent, angry young men and women. You can go around saying they're all so violent, just throw them in jail, this is an underclass, what can you do? You can create fear. The issue of violence is very suitable for a repressive society. Then you can have more legislation, more police, more laws to fight crime, when all you need to do is to encourage people in a different way.

Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

Trust your creativity.

Reading is where the wild things are.

You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue.

We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear.

For me, the most painful thing is the thought of shelves without books. This is the problem with the digital thing. I do not want to see it on electronic. I do not want to see all of those indices on Kindle. I don't want this physical object to disappear, because when it's there and it's present, it's continually suggesting new relationships in a way that an electronic index couldn't.

Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.

Two 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.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.

In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.

Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.

You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” 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?

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.

I care about doing the work as best as I can do, and that it should go on reaching people. It's not about fame and it's not about me. It's about creating something that might allow someone else to create something.

When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?