Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“i miss the company of someone utterly loyal”

“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.”

“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.”