Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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“No emotion is the final one.”

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

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

“Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.”

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

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.”

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

“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.”

“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”

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

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

“The free man never thinks of escape.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.”

“I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only 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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.”

“Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.”