Winterson Quotes

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life. ~ Jeanette Winterson

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you. ~ Jeanette Winterson

... only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame. ~ Jeanette Winterson

There are valleys that lead to the bottom of the world, so it seems, but what world is that? The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness. The more sophisticated my equipment, the stranger the worlds it detects. I sometimes think I'm sailing through a vast thought. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life. ~ Jeanette Winterson

In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go. ~ Jeanette Winterson

He hates for hate's sake. There are people like that. People who have everything. Money, power, sex. When they have everything they play for more sophisticated stakes than the rest of us. There are no thrills left to that man. The sun will never rise and delight him. he will never be lost in a strange town and forced to ask his way. I can't buy him. I can't tempt him. He wants a life for a life. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art. ~ Jeanette Winterson

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top with the phone saying 'Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine.' The trunks shudder ~ Jeanette Winterson

Age is information failure. The body loses fluency. ~ Jeanette Winterson

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. ~ Jeanette Winterson

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Congratulations on your Engagement'.
But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame? ~ Jeanette Winterson

I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. ~ Jeanette Winterson

As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers. ~ Jeanette Winterson

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Words like passion and ecstasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try to turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell os a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. ~ Jeanette Winterson

In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Tell me the story, Pew ... It was a woman. You always say that. There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good. Is that the complete list? Then there is the woman you love. Who's she? That's another story. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos- and it's pain. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Humans have given away all their power to a "they". You aren't able to fight the system because without the system none of you can survive. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Unmoor the boat, we could go ... downriver ...
History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time that returns everything, changes everything..a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity and the beginning of another. ... History is a madman's museum. I think I understand some of this, But it's all subject to the tide. Unmoor the boat. Part miracle part madness. My life is a series of set sails and shipwrecks. I run aground I cut loose, the rim is dangerously near the waterline. I feel like a saint in a coracle. Head thrown back, sun on my throat. Unmoor the boat. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I am not a fan of supermarkets and I hate shopping there, even for things I can't get elsewhere, like cat food and bin bags. A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn't just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noise that made room for everyone, money or not. ~ Jeanette Winterson

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie. ~ Jeanette Winterson

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colors, guillotine colors of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work. ~ Jeanette Winterson

It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment. ~ Jeanette Winterson

If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can't work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter.
Let me in.
You do. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation. ~ Jeanette Winterson

She said she'd often wondered why she wanted to do some things and not do other things at all. Well, it was obvious with some things, but for others, there was no reason there. She'd spent a long time puzzling it out, then she thought that what you'd done in a past life you didn't need to do again, and what you had to do in the future, you wouldn't be ready to do now. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The truth is that I've spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm ... maybe if I hadn't gone with Spike ... maybe if I could have lived more peaceably ... maybe if I'd met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn't done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur. ~ Jeanette Winterson

If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it. ~ Jeanette Winterson

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing? ~ Jeanette Winterson

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

There are two questions: where have you come from, and where are you going? But the brain doesn't have separate regions for the past and future; only the present is differentiated by the brain.
We split time into three parts. The brain, it seems, splits it twice only: now, and not now. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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

There is a spontaneous round of applause in the hall... Victor looks unhappy. He wouldn't call it unhappy, he would call it misunderstood. He waits... Then he does one of the things he does so well -- heads out of the sciences and into the arts:

To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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. ~ Jeanette Winterson

We gamble with the thought of winning. But it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The Future is Now. That annoys me because if the future is now, where is the present? ~ Jeanette Winterson

It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Isn't content also contest? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn't free-floating, it's enmeshed.
That's true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora--that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind--global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves--all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.
Nationalism is on the rise, I say.
He nods. That's a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused. ~ Jeanette Winterson

We're humans, not machines. We have bad days. We have mental difficulties. We are inspired, yet we fail. We are not linear. We have hearts that break and souls we don't know what to do with. We kill and destroy but we build and make possible too. We've been to the moon and invented computers. We outsource most things but we still have to live with ourselves. We're pessimists who believe it's too late so what the hell? We're the comeback kids in love with second chances. And every New Year is another chance. ~ Jeanette Winterson

One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world. ~ Jeanette Winterson

My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was. ~ Jeanette Winterson

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown. ~ Jeanette Winterson

What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force. Ruskin was right, though for the wrong reasons, when he talked about art as a moral force. Art is not about good behaviour, when did you last see a miracle behave well? Art makes us better people because it asks for our full humanity, and humanity is, or should be, the polar opposite of the merely mechanical. We are not part of the machine either, but we have forgotten that. Art is memory - which is quite different [from] history. Art asks that we remember who we are, and usually that asking has to come as provocation - which is why art breaks the rules and the taboos, and at the same time is a moral force. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Trust your creativity. ~ Jeanette Winterson

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.

Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The trouble with books is that you don't know what's in them 'till is too late ~ Jeanette Winterson

It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong. ~ Jeanette Winterson

We get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we shouldn't let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I kissed her and forgot death. ~ Jeanette Winterson

O change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Slightest accidents open up new worlds. ~ Jeanette Winterson

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Whelks are strange and comforting.
They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly.
But they have a strong sense of personal dignity.
Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar there is something noble about a whelk.
Which cannot be said for everybody. ~ Jeanette Winterson

My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson. ~ Paloma Faith

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead. ~ Jeanette Winterson

You'll get over it…" It's the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because 'it" is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? ~ Jeanette Winterson

It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin. ~ Jeanette Winterson

When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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

What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Human beings often display emotions they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not display. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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. ~ Jeanette Winterson

There's a planet,' said Spike, 'made of water, entirely of water, where every solid thing is its watery equivalent. There are no seas because there is no land. There are no rivers because there are no banks. There is no thirst because there is no dry.
'The planet is like a bowl of water except that there is no bowl. It hangs in space as a drop of water hangs from a leaf, except that there is no leaf. It cannot exist, and yet it does. I tell you this so you know that what is impossible sometimes happens. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run? ~ Jeanette Winterson

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalued what the self is. ~ Jeanette Winterson

And if the road leads nowhere?' He shrugged. 'Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging. ~ Jeanette Winterson

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. ~ Jeanette Winterson

We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. 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. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead. ~ Jeanette Winterson

When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Language is what stops the heart exploding. ~ Jeanette Winterson

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup.

As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I ha ~ Jeanette Winterson