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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

“Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion (1987), p.74

“What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.”

Jeanette Winterson

The Powerbook (2000)

“In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now.”

Jeanette Winterson

Art Objects (1995)

“If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much in use for it.”

Jeanette Winterson

Art Objects (1995)

“Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.”

Jeanette Winterson book The World and Other Places

The World and Other Places (1998)

“A sense of social hierarchy prevented Mrs Munde from actually telling the lousy bastard to get out, so instead she began to think evil thoughts. She had once read an article on mind control, explaining that the best way to bend someone to your will was to think of a gooey mudlike substance called Cliff Richard and direct it at the object of your intent. Such were the marshmellow-suffocating properties of this image that the victim fell instantly into an undignified froth. Putty in your hands in fact. It didn't seem to work. The stranger was insensitive as well as intrusive. Mrs Munde gave it one last go till the kitchen air was thick with Cliff Richard. The stranger suddenly made a little squeaking noise and fell sideways.
'Stop it, stop it!' he cried. 'You're pulping my brain.”

Jeanette Winterson

'Well go away then,' sulked Mrs Munde, releasing her victim, not through generosity but because she found the image too nauseating to continue.
Page 28.
See Wikipedia on Cliff Richard.
Boating For Beginners (1985)

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

Jeanette Winterson

The Powerbook (2000)

“Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches ….”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)

“My heart returns to me what I turn away. I am my own master but not always master of myself.”

Jeanette Winterson

The Powerbook (2000)

“Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision.”

Jeanette Winterson

Weight (2005)

“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.”

Jeanette Winterson book Gut Symmetries

Gut Symmetries (1997)

“all the inevitable dying that comes with change. theres no choice that doesnt mean a loss.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: oranges are not the only fruit

“there are different types of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: oranges are not the only fruit

“the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of braille.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: oranges are not the only fruit

“i told myself as hero like any shipwreck story. it was a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not so hamna, and rarely kind.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: why be happy when you can be normal