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Jeanette Winterson Quotes
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Jeanette Winterson, OBE is an award-winning English writer, who became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values. Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity. Winterson is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing. She is a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, which focuses on LGBT issues.

✵ 27. August 1959  •  Other names Jeannette Winterson, جنت وینترسون
Jeanette Winterson photo
Jeanette Winterson: 187 quotes12 likes

Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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

Jeanette Winterson

Source: The Powerbook (2000)

“She was a monster, but she was my monster.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“No emotion is the final one.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“Know thyself,’ said Socrates.
Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Art and Lies

“.. to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

“Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry (1989)

“I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?”

Jeanette Winterson

“Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

“You are a pool of clear water where the light plays”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Art and Lies

“Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

“Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion (1987), p.73

“I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her,
or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Powerbook

“Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. The way there is sudden. The way out is worse.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion (1987)

“Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Variant: every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now.
Source: The Passion

“The free man never thinks of escape.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

“She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

“Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

“One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.”

Jeanette Winterson

“I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“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.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”

Jeanette Winterson

“As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

“There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Art and Lies

“The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”

Jeanette Winterson

“Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

“…I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

“Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough”

Jeanette Winterson book Gut Symmetries

Gut Symmetries (1997)
Context: They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty - even for a moment - it is enough.

“There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

“I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

“Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.”

Jeanette Winterson

“I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

“Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)”

Jeanette Winterson