|
70207af
|
If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
cc6dbf3
|
Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
d2d5d78
|
Their throats were bare for God.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
3b617cc
|
Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny.
|
|
fate
future
mythology
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
658a11f
|
That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.
|
|
words
passion
love
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
19db64b
|
There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
6c65db4
|
What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favorite aunt in our favorite poker parlor) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favorite poker in our favorite aunt). I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris's front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs. Virtue's sewing class. Mrs. Virtue should either..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
fc526ff
|
The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
56fad68
|
And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?
|
|
enlightenment
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
bfc61b3
|
I love her." "Then you do not love the Lord." "Yes, I love both of them." "You cannot." "I do."
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
8fff1c2
|
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. Th..
|
|
life
opening
narrative
birth
longing-for-death
nostalgia
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
841375e
|
There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
|
|
thoughts
feelings
objectivity
subjectivity
thinking
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
17d2944
|
There was a man here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories like a madman, so that as one ended another began. On the seventh day he had told all the stories he knew and that was when he began to tell himself as if he were a story, from the earliest beginnings to his green and deep misfortune. The story h..
|
|
story
light
saved
lost
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
d7e1c2b
|
I stretched out my hands, holding the falling sun in one hand, and the climbing moon in the other, my silver and gold, my gift from life. My gift of life. My life is a hesitation in time. An opening in a cave. A gap for a word.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
83753f2
|
I kissed her and forgot death.
|
|
kiss
love
lesbianism
lesbian
existentialism
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
53f6583
|
Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
408c9d4
|
Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next. Love is an intervention.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
43b5459
|
Something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown.
|
|
complexities
differences
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
ef82619
|
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time..
|
|
time
history
death
life
human-spirit
creativity
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
dcd902d
|
They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
1cb6725
|
I argue that it is not Woolf's remoteness that puts people off but her nearness that terrifies them. Her language is not a woolly blanket it is a sharp sword. , which is the most difficult of her works, is a strong-honed edge through the cloudiness most of us call life. It is uncomfortable to have the thick padded stuff ripped away. There is no warm blanket to be had out of Virginia Woolf; there is wind and sun and you naked. It is not rem..
|
|
writing
virginia-woolf
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
39c4f41
|
When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. ... When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the ..
|
|
temptation
reason
love
truth
formalities
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
d5e93ad
|
The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.
|
|
world
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
3609898
|
But, Mistress, do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
19fe636
|
It is always a mistake to argue with a librarian.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
d37958a
|
I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.
|
|
sex
books
books-express
winterson
sexuality
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
171a60a
|
There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
10f3986
|
Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
925f7d8
|
I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
991f16d
|
Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
314af90
|
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and them 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?
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
a07d95a
|
Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.
|
|
violence
working-class
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
9ff498b
|
Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off.
|
|
pain
suffering
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
1d2bf94
|
I say I appear naked before you, but so often I whistle for my invisible armed guard; the gap-toothed, jeering, club-headed mob, my feelings, that are used to having me to themselves.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
6ca18bf
|
Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
1c43ef7
|
Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
9e5e480
|
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 undervalues what the self is.
|
|
life
timidity
self
selfishness
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
4020ca4
|
She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.
|
|
duty
parents
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
2d544fe
|
I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
ca4ca9a
|
What is luck', he said, 'but the ability to exploit accidents?
|
|
serendipity
luck
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
b33854e
|
How long before the shouting starts? How long before the tears and the accusations and the pain? That specific stone n the stomach pain when you lose something you haven't got round to valuing? Why is the measure of love loss?
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
d2177f2
|
The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water - either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in your rock - your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
58d8b67
|
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.
|
|
writer
trust
narrative
unspoken
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
d37ac81
|
True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are. A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don't want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |