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17c49bb
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There's no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take is seriously.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a0995df
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It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.
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living
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Jeanette Winterson |
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673361f
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What we notice in stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d0b9438
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Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another.
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time
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Jeanette Winterson |
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81bbd5f
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The grey city and its lost hearts force its way between myself and my healing.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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afc0cbf
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For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0b42889
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It is true that on bright days we are happy. That is true because the sun on the eyelids effects chemical changes in the body. The sun also diminishes the pupils to pinpricks, letting the light in less. When we can hardly see we are most likely to fall in love.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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82caf09
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We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. If was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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94e29cd
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Wrong to seal illogic with a kiss but I do it myself all the time.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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683f8f2
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We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in. . . . It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c741b44
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Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.
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knowledge
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f378eb9
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Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a09bb5b
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f76c05d
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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bfc80e1
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Passion out of passion's obstacles.
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obsession
passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b1de734
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Come again?' She asked. Yes tomorrow, under the sodium street lights, under the tick of the clock. Under my obligations, my history, my fears, this now. This fizzy, giddy all consuming now. I will not let time lie to me. I will not listen to dead voices or unborn pain. "What if?" Has no power against 'what if not?' The not of you is unbearable. I must have you...."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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40652e5
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to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.
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creation
existence
jeanette-winterson
oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit
to-create
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e9c501f
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Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis.
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enchantment
shakespeare
spells
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0ab12e3
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Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.
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perception
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5d7f5fe
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1c3a7a2
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And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman's fortune or one man's loss. And we can't know the lives of others. And we can't know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside of the clocks. It tak..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5a3a69f
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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.
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literature
self
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f582bf5
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Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning, on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born on have travelled all over the world. The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calender, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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446a1e1
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when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics." (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? p. 103)"
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Jeanette Winterson |
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418f286
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It's so crude' complained her mother, who believed in Good Taste the way Sunday worshipers believed in the Immaculate Conception. She wasn't quite sure what it was but she was sure it was important.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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08fd97e
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There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f1a3171
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The pursuit of happiness is more elusive, it is life long and not goal-centered. Whant you are pusuing is meaning - a meaningful life. The fate the draw that is yours and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream thats going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when your realize that being barely alive , on your own terms, is better then living a bloated half-..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1bad711
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Somewhere beween the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere beween fear and sex. Somewere beween God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a3b2ed0
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Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5c6ff65
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As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5b52910
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What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3dc61af
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He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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212a558
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Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people kept fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained
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Jeanette Winterson |
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aa2ae08
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Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f640184
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And if you have found your voice, you can be heard
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6f4b6fd
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Women are just planets that attract the wrong species.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c1d8b1a
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I am thinking of a certain September: Wood pigeon Red Admiral Yellow Harvest Orange Night. 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. I did worship them but now I am alone on ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ec0447a
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Atlas gazed out, as he always did, into infinite space, wishing he could be part of it, even for one hour.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a7c732d
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Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.
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oxford
sexism
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Jeanette Winterson |
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10ebc6e
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I have had a lot to put up with," she said, looking meaningfully at me. "I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day."
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christianity
what-would-jesus-do
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5c33100
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The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1b1d46d
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I sat at the back, listening to the music or mumbling through the sevice. I'm never tempted by God, but I like his trappings.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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cd019e8
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It seems to me that being the right size for your world-- and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions-- is a valuable clue to learning how to live.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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020b854
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There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.
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reality
unreality
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Jeanette Winterson |