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2e52dd6
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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138536a
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I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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74828c6
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I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about being 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 when 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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Jeanette Winterson |
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36ef35c
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Woolf worried about the childlessness from time to time, and suffered from the imposed anxiety that she was not, unlike her friend Vita Sackville-West, a real woman. I do not know what kind of woman one would have to be to stand unflinchingly in front of The Canon, but I would guess, a real one. There is something sadistic in the whip laid on women to prove themselves as mothers and wives at the same time as making their way as artists. The..
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women
writing
virginia-woolf
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Jeanette Winterson |
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fa266a6
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Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.
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family
love
faults
parents
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7acf8db
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He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.
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work
work-life-balance
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Jeanette Winterson |
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61e6db7
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St Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry. She wanted to be a nun. She hoped I would be a priest and saved to give me an education while my friends plaited rope and trailed after the plough. 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 interest..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f23ae7f
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Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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13f80da
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She looked at me. There was a second the kind that holds the whole world ...
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1836609
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When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love -- its quality -- to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.
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parental-love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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263a9f6
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I was in danger of drowning, and nobody lost at sea worries about whether the spar they cling to is made of elm or oak.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a6b68a9
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It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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70df673
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He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2643a29
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It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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43110dd
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I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3b4b292
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It takes much longer to leave the psychic place than the physical place." (p.120)"
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truth-telling
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9d940b1
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I am not a fan of supermarkets and I hate shopping there, even for things I can't get elsewhere, like cat food and bin bags. A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn't just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noise that made room for everyone, money or not.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9b95db8
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The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a6710ce
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There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.
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history
civilization
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5f592a3
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Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. i know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope in the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0cf4398
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I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past - whether parents, partners or friends - we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.
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reconciliation
forgiveness
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ffcfaeb
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In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0d81b1a
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On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit has tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood ..
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purpose
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1cff9ed
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History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1695568
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Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.
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feminism
jeanette-winterson
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Jeanette Winterson |
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15c6dc3
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A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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242bbc6
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Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way the..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3baf9b0
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Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run?
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loss
memories
past
love
trip
nostalgia
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Jeanette Winterson |
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744cd01
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The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off his body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.
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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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88d3595
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I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3b1e6cc
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Death will be like that. We will be forever recognizing people we have never met.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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54a2096
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My experience has been that times always ends. In theory, you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the religious and romantics are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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72167f5
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I had to leave. She would have died for my sake. Wasn't it better for me to live a half life for her sake?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5ab86be
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Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socra..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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03626d6
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She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4701d76
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Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5274144
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I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ebc9b59
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Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
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end-times
revelation
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Jeanette Winterson |
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909e562
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When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
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migration
home
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3e3db17
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I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.
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humanity
inspirational
survival
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Jeanette Winterson |
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077613b
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He called me Jess because that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon. I was his falcon. I hung on his arm and fed at his hand. He said my nose was sharp and cruel and that my eyes had madness in them. He said I would tear him to pieces if he dealt softly with me. At night, if he was away, he had me chained to our bed. It was a long chain, long enough for me to use the chamber pot or to stand at the window and wait for the la..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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019515f
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Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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031ed5f
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The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents
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Jeanette Winterson |