Jeanette Winterson citations

Page 3

“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.”

“The curious are always in some danger.”

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

“The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.”

“She was a monster, but she was my monster.”

“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.”

“No emotion is the final one.”

“Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?”

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

“Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.”

“.. to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.”

“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.”

“Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.”

“I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”

“Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?”

“Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.”

“You are a pool of clear water where the light plays”

“It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.”

“Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.”

“Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.”

“Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?”

“When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.”

“Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play.”

“Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.”

“I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”

“Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.”

“To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her,
or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love”

“Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. The way there is sudden. The way out is worse.”