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7c132f7
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In the sky, Planet Moon is 239,000 miles away. That's not far when you remember that the sun is 93 million miles away.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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32f867c
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I have music. Music is the world inside me. I am a performer, but whether or not I perform, the music is there.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0a23a6b
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The words come at my call but who calls whom?
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writing
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Jeanette Winterson |
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70786ed
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Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3cff712
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She is like a mathematical equation, always there and impossible to disprove.
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mothers
parents
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Jeanette Winterson |
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fa863af
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Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall. Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it--and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself how to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love. We..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a45f02d
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And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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bbedc60
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Pursuing happiness, and I did, and still do, is not at all the same thing as being happy - which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine...The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life...There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own ..
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happiness-advice
happiness-life
happiness-quotes
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b372e1a
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Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d8405cc
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I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.
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life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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293a6a1
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I like to see the people arriving. I like to imagine their lives. It keeps me from thinking too much about my own. A man shouldn't be too introspective. It weakens him. That is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I'm a Hemingway man myself although I don't believe it is right to hunt lions.
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life
tennessee-williams
hunting
thinking
lives
introspection
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Jeanette Winterson |
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58c01ed
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And love? I am still in love with her. Not a day breaks but that I think of her, and when the dogwood turns red in winter I stretch out my hands and imagine her hair. I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making. Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself. My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4869c20
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The third is to refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it is given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, nev..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7a88177
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I don't like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don't mean it then what else am I? Will I cherish you, adore you, make way for you, make myself better for you, look at you and always see you, tell you the truth? And if love is not those things then what things?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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363131f
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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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literature
perspective
perspective-on-life
story-telling
stories
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9df461c
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There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.
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fiction
science
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c1f6c7c
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So what is it to be? Banality of convention or banality of individuation? Shall I choose society's cliches or my own? Is it a step forward to have understood that there is no real difference between them?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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13f1581
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The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6c1da59
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There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It's much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0d09af9
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Why doesn't every mother believer her child can change the world? The child can. This is the joke. Here we are still looking for a saviour and hundreds are being born every second. Look at it, this tiny capsule of new life, indifferent to your prejudices, your miseries, unmindful of the world already made. Make it again? They could if we let them, but we make sure they grow up just like us, fearful like us. Don't let them know the potential..
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fear
potential
children
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7b7814f
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And you and me in the car where we've always been, where we'll always be, this night, this road, even when we're gone and the road is gone and the city is gone but we'll be here because everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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627c7b3
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Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.
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literature
life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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210ee78
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Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
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time
literature
jeanette-winterson
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7714888
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It seems so easy now to destroy libraries--mainly by taking away all the books--and to say that books and libraries are not relevant to people's lives. There's a lot of talk about social breakdown and alienation, but how can it be otherwise when our ideas of progress remove the centres that did so much to keep people together? In the North people met in the church, in the pub, in the marketplace, and in those philanthropic buildings where ..
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libraries
meeting-places
social-centers
community
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9954a8e
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Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?
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literature
jeanette-winterson
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Jeanette Winterson |
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477bbf3
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But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?
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literature
jeanette-winterson
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4c7fccb
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Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ae65eb6
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He loves books,' said Perdita. 'Yeah. He does. When you've finished a book you can put it away and it doesn't ask to see you again.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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76903f0
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What's the big deal? Snow's just rain that's been left out in the cold.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f927859
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I'm not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. Trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I'm telling you because I know..
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existence
life
significance
middle-age
insignificance
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Jeanette Winterson |
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40d91b6
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Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us wave..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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84c8602
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Why is it the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love? It is so terrifying..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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730d108
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People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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79bdba9
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She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.
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world
self-containment
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Jeanette Winterson |
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917b683
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Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.
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snow
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0ae6dc2
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It's better if I think of my life like that - part miracle, part madness. It's better if I accept that I can't control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0f6c6f8
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To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5e8e422
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I like passion, I like to be among the desperate.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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249f6db
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I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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86fa0ca
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To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a71087c
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It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. 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.
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evil
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e0acc41
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Miss Pinch came visiting, and asked me what I intended to do with my Future. She spoke about it as though it were an incurable disease.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8883856
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If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3a6dc0a
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It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.
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Jeanette Winterson |