Jeanette Winterson citations

Page 5

“I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.”

“I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?”

“This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”

“This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.”

“If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.”

“There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.”

“I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”

“I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.”

“I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.”

“Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.”

“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.”

“Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.”

“I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.”

“Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.”

“Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.”

“I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day.

A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.”

“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.”

“The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said…. Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.”

“Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.”

“I'm telling you stories. Trust me.”

“Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.”

“Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.”

“A bridge is a meeting place… a possibility, a metaphor.”

“Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.”

“Infatuation. First Love. Lust.
My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.”

“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”

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

“I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.”

“I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.”