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7adbd9b
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I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse. I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
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meaning-of-life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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fdc6513
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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 floot is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9459cd9
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I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy. I started to cry.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0310457
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That is what literature offers-- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c107b4b
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Gertrude drives on. She says, 'Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it,
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8583579
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It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6a966b3
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The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.
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libraries
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Jeanette Winterson |
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cb9dddc
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Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- "When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ceda0ac
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Then, as now, nobody talked about the legacy of Empire. Britain had colonised, owned, occupied or interfered with half the world. We had carved up some countries and created others. When some of the world we had made by force wanted something in return, we were outraged.
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colonialist-britain
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Jeanette Winterson |
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32fd493
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Soldiers and women. That's how the world is. Any other role is temporary. Any other role is a gesture.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5eb9e81
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Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the saem as being happy - which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine. If the sun is shining, stand in it - yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass - they have to - because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life.
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life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a752bb7
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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 the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun.
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passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7c860a4
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We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4308f5c
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Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."' That's from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a528daa
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Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5ad7d03
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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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heartbreaking
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8c3a237
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Bridges join but they also separate.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7ef791e
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He doesn't take a photo or a video because he wants to remember -- by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can't capture.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1218180
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To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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bea18b7
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When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d5a7922
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The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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81d8926
|
Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.
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literature
jeanette-winterson
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Jeanette Winterson |
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48b2d59
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c87dba2
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There are valleys that lead to the bottom of the world, so it seems, but what world is that? The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness. The more sophisticated my equipment, the stranger the worlds it detects. I sometimes think I'm sailing through a vast thought.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3ec0d1c
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Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.
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life
truths
perspective
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8677916
|
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
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life
writers
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Jeanette Winterson |
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57a6399
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What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9cce8c9
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It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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479b207
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In their world good manners and good sense prevail. They don't imagine that to choose sensibly is to set a time-bomb under yourself. They don't imagine you are ripe for the cutting, waiting for your chance at life. They don't think of the wreckage an exploding life will cause... Settle down, feet under the table. She's a nice girl, he's a nice boy. It's the cliches that cause the trouble.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9c59170
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You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day." "You'll get older," said my mother, "that's what happens." "Then what happens?" "You won't be able to find the treasure." "Will I be too old to look for it?" "No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place." --
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youth
treasure
growing-up
aging
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8566784
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He turned away and I turned to him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. Ignorant of alchemy they put their faith in technology and turned the whole world into gold. The dead sand shone.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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08de0f8
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Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind. I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time - linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time,..
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time
risk
home
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Jeanette Winterson |
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42c7dc3
|
Memories separated in time are often recalled side by side-there's an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the diary dates and everything to do with the feeling. Remembering isn't like visiting a museum: Look! There's the long-gone object in a glass case. Memory isn't an archive. Even a simple memory is a cluster. Something that seemed so insignificant at the time suddenly becomes the key when we remember it at a particular time..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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51078f1
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The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colors, guillotine colors of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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84c979d
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I'm not afraid of what I am. I'm afraid I will see what I am not.
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personality
self
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8e32d73
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A treasure had fallen into our hands and the treasure was each other.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a1a39c0
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Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7e61195
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I asked my mother why we couldn't have books and she said, 'The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late.' I thought to myself, 'Too late for what?
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reading
sedition
danger
censorship
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Jeanette Winterson |
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78a6f58
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I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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01ef7bc
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All of one's life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.
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freedom
life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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827f493
|
When I hold you in this night-soaked bed it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. It couldn't be simpler. It couldn't be harder. In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a4dc02d
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Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7abd53e
|
what the church calls love is actually psychosis and (...) what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people's.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1f9684b
|
I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.
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Jeanette Winterson |