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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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no
questions
yes
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c96cecb
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Energy cannot be lost, only transformed; where do the words go?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7dcd069
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Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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75dd883
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We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who's kidding whom?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a63b42d
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If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c9807fc
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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 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?
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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
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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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brain
emotions
feeling
state-of-mind
suppression
thoughts
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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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71cc773
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I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What's the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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55d733b
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The night seems more temporary than the day, especially to lovers, and it also seems more uncertain. In this way it sums up our lives, which are uncertain and temporary. We forget about that in the day. In the day we go on for ever.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b81a8ea
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There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1f5cbac
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I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn't I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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df67763
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The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7d51cc9
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Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught by a radio receiver, light years later, like a recorded message nobody heard, back-played now into infinity across time. Love and loss.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e31e013
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I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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31f8940
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Cheer up ye saints of God, There's nothing to worry about; Nothing to make you feel afraid, Nothing to make you doubt; Remember Jesus saves you; So why not trust him and shout, You'll be sorry you worried at all, tomorrow, morning.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8da6486
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My dear, you are in danger of being burned by your own flame.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0b74202
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My mother's eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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41f0215
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If there is another life he will find her there.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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acbcbf1
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People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that?
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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
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The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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de86795
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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
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I need the dark places to get outside of common sense
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Jeanette Winterson |
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34e8802
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Perhaps it is true that the world is made new again every day but our minds are not. The clamp that holds me will not let me go.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7031451
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All the familiar things were getting different meanings.
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Jeanette Winterson |