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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

“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.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

“Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Variant: It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.
Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.'
I answered you: 'Isolde.'
Isolde. The world became a word.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

“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.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: The Powerbook

“I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?”

Jeanette Winterson book Gut Symmetries

Source: Gut Symmetries

“This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Written on the Body

“I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

“Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion (1987)

“If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.”

Jeanette Winterson

“Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

“I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day.

A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: The World and Other Places: Stories

“A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said…. Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Stone Gods

Source: The Stone Gods

“Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

“I'm telling you stories. Trust me.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion (1987)

“Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.”

Jeanette Winterson

“Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: The Powerbook

“A bridge is a meeting place… a possibility, a metaphor.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion (1987)
Context: We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void... For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night? (p.57)

“Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Art and Lies

“I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

The Passion (1987)

“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. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping (2004)

“I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. the world just pours it out.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping (2004)

“Bask in it. In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

The Passion (1987)

“In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.”

Jeanette Winterson

Written on the Body (1992)

“Where 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?”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping (2004)

“I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The Sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping (2004), p. 197

“Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)

“He's the kind of man who was born to rise and rise: a human elevator.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Stone Gods

Source: The Stone Gods (2007), p.7

“No second chances at a single moment.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

The Passion (1987)

“I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything– the miracle– is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (2011), p.31

“She thought of an article she had once seen on mind control. Apparently if there was a person fiendish enough to set about interfering with your life, the only thing you could do was to concentrate hard on someone they were unlikely ever to have heard of called Martin Amis. The particular blankness of this image was guaranteed to protect from any subtle force, but Gloria realised with a sinking heart that it was too late now.”

Jeanette Winterson

Page 22.
See also Martin Amis himself.
Boating For Beginners (1985)

“He's a curious man; a shrug of the shoulders and a wink and that's him. He's never thought it odd that his daughter cross-dresses for a living and sells second-hand purses on the side. But then, he's never thought it odd that his daughter was born with webbed feet.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion (1987), p.61

“Only the impossible is worth the effort.”

Jeanette Winterson

The Powerbook (2000)

“Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there's no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you'll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone's nightmares come true.”

Jeanette Winterson

Written on the Body (1992)

“When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not.”

Jeanette Winterson

Art Objects (1995)

“I felt as if I had blundered into someone else's life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.”

Jeanette Winterson

The Powerbook (2000)

“I am a glass man, but there is no light in me that can shine across the sea. I shall lead no one home, save no lives, not even my own.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping (2004)

“That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the worlds tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry (1989), p.13

“Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a café, years ago.”

Jeanette Winterson

Weight (2005)

“My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

The Passion (1987)