Jeanette Winterson citations

Page 4

“Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.”

“The free man never thinks of escape.”

“She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.”

“Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.”

“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.”

“I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.”

“If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.”

“I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.”

“Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.”

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

“As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.”

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

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

“If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.”

“The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”

“Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.”

“…I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.”

“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”

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

“It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.”

“There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.”

“I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.”

“Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.”

“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.”

“Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)”

“We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.”

“Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.”

“Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.”

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