Jeanette Winterson: Quotes about life

Jeanette Winterson is English writer. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Jeanette Winterson: 374 quotes11 likes

“I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”

Jeanette Winterson

“Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion

“What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: The Powerbook (2000)

“There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“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.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (2011), p.38
Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

“I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.”

Jeanette Winterson

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“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)
Context: 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.

“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.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

“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?

“Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Stone Gods

Source: The Stone Gods

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)