Jeanette Winterson citations

Page 2

“I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.”

“Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.”

“Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”

“I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.”

“There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.”

“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.”

“But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.”

“I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.”

“It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.”

“Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.”

“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.”

“Trust me, I'm telling you stories…. I can change the story. I am the story.”

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”

“When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.”

“the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.”

“When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”

“A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.”

“I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.”

“To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.”

“Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.”

“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”