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b068711
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You'll get over it..." It's the cliches 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 ..
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love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1969931
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As your lover describes you, so you are.
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self-fulfilling-prophecy
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Jeanette Winterson |
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09ebac6
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What you risk reveals what you value.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f6971cf
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I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
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thoughts
romance
identity
religion
life
lesbian
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f4123ae
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I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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093aac5
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I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.
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rejection
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Jeanette Winterson |
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24123db
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He: What's the matter with you? Me: Nothing. Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her."
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depression
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f5a1610
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The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f0addb7
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I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c757074
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Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a3dea3a
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Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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527df2a
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The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.
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life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2a7654b
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Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave a..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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cef4815
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To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8d91ccb
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Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.
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time
friendship
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0d0767c
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Why is the measure of love loss?
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love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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aa94ae7
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I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved thi..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6be5760
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In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.
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transition
chaos
space
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b2611fe
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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60ad2ea
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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.
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words
lies
library
reading
people
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b283446
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Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.
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passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c68e385
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Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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61f6e8e
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What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e33d6e5
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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? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.
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passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b873925
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They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
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inspirational
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ada0114
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do it from the heart or not at all.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ccc239b
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I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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efb94ec
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She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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facdcf8
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I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ed134e1
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There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7f0f05a
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On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love... or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not known it, habit being a great binder...
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0f35722
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4f282dc
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Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.
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passion
obsession
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0a6f8ec
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I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.
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fate
destiny
life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9d4ec7a
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But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c7ee8c6
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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46cb85d
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There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7fdd1b4
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He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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dbf11d8
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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..
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religion
life
love
philosophy
lgbt
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d28f2f4
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8c9d9fc
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Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.
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touch
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Jeanette Winterson |
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25b1b29
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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71fb900
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6c3c67f
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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.
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literature
reading
comfort
home
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Jeanette Winterson |