Jeanette Winterson: Thing

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”

“Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.”

“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.”

“Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”

“You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.”

“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.”

“We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.”

“I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.”

“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.”

“You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?”

“Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.”

“There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies”

“There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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