|
4f39b9f
|
I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.
|
|
writing
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
40f0819
|
About her life to come, when she'd have a mansion and no neighbors. All she ever wanted was for everyone to go away. And when I did she never forgave me. She loved miracle stories, probably because her life was a far away from a miracle as Jupiter is from the Earth. She believed in miracles, even though she never got one-- well, maybe she did get one, but that was me, and she didn't know that miracles often come in disguise.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
e165fc6
|
I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society." "That puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls 'the ecstasy of the privileged moment. Art, all art, as insight, as transformation, as joy. Unlike Harold Bloom, I really believe that human beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
1f39a08
|
It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
a508174
|
I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
2e434b0
|
Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness. The
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
74f00f3
|
Are you like all other men after all? The poor should have no justice, just as they have no food, no decent shelter, no regular livelihood? Is that how your saviour Jesus treated the poor?
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
137af52
|
There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.
|
|
understanding
hate
history
civilization
ignorance
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
c9bcb4b
|
Perhaps art is an eye problem...
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
a379604
|
Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandones class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
31d6280
|
They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.
|
|
men
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
3480a27
|
What is unconscious does not speak and that includes the hidden parts of himself.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
ef68121
|
Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
0bac907
|
I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; stella maris of the upper air.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
b344a8d
|
She had navigated her parents' hostile waters with a child's discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. Learning to hide love.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
dc2125d
|
It would not be the first time that Jove and Stella had covered the traces of where I began and where they ended. I liked the playfulness of the lovers' argument: who are you and who am I? Which of us is which? Liked it less when the erotic twinhood developed into forged letters and faked signatures.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
5cad60b
|
Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
c6fa480
|
Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don't matter a bit.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
d94f597
|
When the children of Israel left Egypt, they were guided by the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night. For them, this did not seem to be a problem. For me, it was an enormous problem. The pillar of cloud was a fog, perplexing and impossible. I didn't understand the ground rules. The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their v..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
3bbed46
|
Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
016ff57
|
Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy. The unknownness of my needs frighten..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
b3603b3
|
What could I do? My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she'd do what most people do when confronted with something ..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
e64b5d8
|
A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
980bc35
|
I tried to copy my parents, as monkeys do, but they were trying to copy me, looking to the child for the energy and hope they had long since lost.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
2065ffd
|
There is a bit [in ] where I talk about 'keeping the heart awake to love and beauty.' That's very difficult in our world, even when things are going well. It's not a world with much room for love and beauty. The daily news is [filled with] everything that goes wrong in our world, and everything horrible and unpleasant. I think that saturates your mind with negativity. I really think we need something to counteract that. I don't think it's ..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
73aa49e
|
At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.
|
|
literature
reading
feelings
books
safety
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
57b6363
|
I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.
|
|
literature
philosophy
jeanette-winterson
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
5387d1e
|
Lonely cries, and she was lonely, not for friends but for a time that hadn't been violated.
|
|
time
violation
regret
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
c258cb4
|
There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
0048c88
|
The wider we read the freer we become.
|
|
reading
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
996a4fa
|
I am short, so I like the little guy/underdog stories, but they are not straightforwardly about one size versus another. Think about, say, Jack and the Beanstalk, which is basically a big ugly stupid giant, and a smart little Jack who is fast on his feet. OK, but the unstable element is the beanstalk, which starts as a bean and grows into a huge tree-like thing that Jack climbs to reach the castle. This bridge between two worlds is unpredic..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
073ae63
|
Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
b7a39f0
|
Zina isledigimi biliyordum cunku sevdigim sey evimin disindaydi.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
16f8537
|
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.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
167998b
|
What is a memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
1aa76d5
|
We're here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it's all part of the paradox.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
240f81b
|
And if the road leads nowhere?' He shrugged. 'Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
dd010bd
|
The saggy armchair of cliches.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
44d37b7
|
where will we go next, when there are no more wildernesses?
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
30008ff
|
She had been a career woman all her life. She noted there was no such thing as a career man. She had made her choices. No regrets, But there were losses. There always were.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
bfbbeff
|
What if?' has no power against 'What if not?' The not of you is unbearable. I must have you.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
0a14178
|
If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.
|
|
blinkered
narrow-mindedness
small-minded
environment
ignorance
expectations
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
a3d567a
|
Adopted children are self invented because we have to be. There's an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently. Like a bomb in the womb, the baby explodes into an unknown world and it's only knowable through some kind of story. Of course, that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after its started. It's like re..
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |
|
89a216c
|
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
|
|
|
Jeanette Winterson |