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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 |
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3338e64
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The night I left home I felt that I had been tricked or trapped into going - and not even by Mrs Winterson, but by the dark narrative of our life together. Her fatalism was so powerful. She was her own black hole that pulled in all the light. She was made of dark matter and her force was invisible unseen except in its effects. What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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693abf2
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True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction - don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7b222dc
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Why was money worth everything when you had none of it, and nothing when you had too much?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8f95991
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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. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read 'My life stood -- a loaded gun' we know we have met an im..
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reading
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4267b20
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We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d3193b4
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What is 'no'? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the 'yes'.
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yes
no
questions
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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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ba46400
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There's a planet called Echo. It doesn't exist. It's like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and the deck empty. It comes on the radar, you fly towards it, there's nothing there. Our crew were outside, repairing the craft, and we saw it moving at speed right at us. It passed straight through the ship and through our bodies, and the strange thing that happened was the bleach. It bleached our clothes and hair, and men that had b..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0c960b3
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My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate. I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that -even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hulll shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother. Sh..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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57e46b5
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The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. ... Wisdom says forget, the body howls.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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04c8ce3
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Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.
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love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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57589f1
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Love is as strong as death.
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love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f6b3bea
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He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love.
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love
|
Jeanette Winterson |
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990942f
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People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0bea69d
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In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening. Well, I find it so.
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thoughts
state-of-mind
brain
feeling
suppression
emotions
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Jeanette Winterson |
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004f657
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Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn't there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain sides. Your red hair blazing and you are saying, "Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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697a2ba
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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. I've thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn't finished, why did the other one go? And why ..
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death-of-a-loved-one
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Jeanette Winterson |
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38b24f8
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When I touch her, my fingers don't question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1fc8b75
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Why doesn't she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can't get warm... She won't be cold. She has the sun inside her.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ef69d32
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When I had no books and had to learn everything I needed off by heart, and when I had to hide what books I had, I promised myself a library filled with the best editions I could afford. I have it now. Books bought out of books. A red room with deep chairs and a fireplace lit. Books of every kind, but no paperbacks, and certain shelves where First Editions are. This is not my study, where there are plenty of paperbacks, it is a contemplative..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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99aa1c8
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e629153
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And I thought of us, years and years later, you and I, in Paris, and how you seemed to be saying we had every choice, every chance. You acted as though you were free, but you were a ransom note. I paid to watch. I watched your fingers, your red mouth. I watched you undress. I didn't see you go. Later I was still paying and I never counted the cost. You were worth it. Again and again you were worth it. My heart has unlimited funds. Draw on t..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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37f5bd9
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moss that is concentrating on being green.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ccab2f3
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And here's the shock -- when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, you do not experience great joy and huge energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out an..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6886fb5
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I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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89d9ff9
|
The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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de86795
|
Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am a wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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277335c
|
I need the dark places to get outside of common sense
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Jeanette Winterson |