Jeanette Winterson Quotes

“Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.”

“By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.”

“Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.”

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”

“Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.”

“I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.”

“If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.”

“This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.”

“Infatuation. First Love. Lust.
My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.”

“I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.”

“What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.”

“I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.”

“There are more than two chances– many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.”

“Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.”

“I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”

“There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.”

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”

“The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.”

“Do you fall in love often?"

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.”

“When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”

“It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.”

“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”

“Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don’t give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it…”

“Why is the measure of love… loss? pg.9”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave”

“Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”

“What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?”

“They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?”

“do it from the heart or not at all.”

“I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.”

“She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”

“No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value.”

“I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.”

“Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.”

“Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”

“I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.”

“There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.”

“He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.”

“But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.”

“I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”

“You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.”

“As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”

“The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.”

“It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.”

“Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.”

“There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.”

“Trust me, I'm telling you stories…. I can change the story. I am the story.”

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”

“When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.”

“the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.”

“When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”

“A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it?”

“That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

“We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.”

“Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.”

“To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.”

“Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.”

“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”

“You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?”

“I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.”

“The curious are always in some danger.”

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”

“The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.”