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8f391b2
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Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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405627a
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People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b18f9ce
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Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
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truth
sexing-the-cherry
language
lie
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Jeanette Winterson |
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bbd9de0
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I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn..
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words
literature
reading
healing
hurt
language
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5b9198c
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Know thyself,' said Socrates. Know thyself,' said Sappho, 'and make sure that the Church never finds out.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ea0985b
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How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel to cities of the int..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b72294e
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I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.
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happiness
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Jeanette Winterson |
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fa95ed1
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I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of seperate worlds meeting is very small. The lure is immense. We send starships. We fall in love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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fa22627
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I didn't want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it's rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6b30158
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Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
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travel
sexing-the-cherry
journey
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e434444
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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?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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25b2e4f
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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74fd4e1
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You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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db22daf
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Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.
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sympathy
light
darkness
weakness
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6cec52d
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Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
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reading
danger
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Jeanette Winterson |
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889bfb6
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Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6311fed
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You are a pool of clear water where the light plays
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love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4da4adf
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For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots...but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1614827
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I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d33fe5d
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Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story's silent twin. There are so many things that we can't say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can s..
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silence
truth
narrative
storytelling
trauma
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Jeanette Winterson |
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70c257a
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Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7303e06
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Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
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art-objects
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Jeanette Winterson |
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86a7e36
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When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2c79bd2
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You don't fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It's like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else's planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across spac..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5b200f6
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Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1ab9170
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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..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a2bdd4f
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He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love. But they might not be telling the truth. Never mind that. You tell them the truth. What do you mean? You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own. So what should I say? When? When I love someone? You should say it.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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455923d
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Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1432b7a
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There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard. Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a261bd2
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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359c36a
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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 space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.
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words
literature
reading
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ff2357f
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To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e67ce6e
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Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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dd2edc2
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Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life--to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life. And extremes--whether of dullness or fury--successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies--unconscious strategies--to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoi..
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feelings
life
extremes
inadequate
living-life
avoidance
suppression
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d4a85ec
|
Somewhere between fear and sex passion is.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7c45132
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The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need. Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined l..
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literature
reading
freedom
imagination
wildness
connection
human-nature
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9731c42
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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.
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oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit
walls
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7c101e7
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I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
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words
literature
reading
poetry
healing
language
trauma
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Jeanette Winterson |
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128d424
|
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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9349160
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She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c0e8abd
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Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6803d39
|
Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. What..
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passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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165fdaa
|
The free man never thinks of escape.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0073572
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |