Jeanette Winterson: Finding

“What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?”

“She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”

“He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.”

“As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”

“That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

“There are more than two chances– many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.”

“Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”