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cbab2b7
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Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? He said.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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943a4ef
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Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed [...] but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it. [...] We're [the demons] 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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9d24bc1
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Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.
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time
history
meaning
life
objectivity
subjectivity
memory
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d3d75d3
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I have a theory that every time you make an important decision, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ee89f0b
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and what is memory but a rope slung across time?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a285b60
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In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2d6c7c5
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We had killed them all without firing a shot. I prayed for the snow to fall and bury them for ever. When the snow falls you can almost believe the world is clean again. Is every snowflake different? No one knows.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5ad9b3b
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Jo era felic, pero felic es una paraula adulta. No cal preguntar-li a un nen si es felic, ja es veu. O ho son o no ho son. Els adults parlen de ser felicos perque en general no ho son. Parlar-ne es com intentar atrapar el vent. Es molt mes facil deixar-lo que t'encalci. Quant a aixo, no estic d'acord amb els filosofs. Parlen de coses apassionants pero ho fan sense passio. No parleu mai de felicitat amb un filosof.
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happiness
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3d9957c
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Diuen que cada floc de neu es diferent. Si aixo fos cert, com podria el mon anar endavant? Com podriem aixecar-nos de les nostres genuflexions? Com podriem recuperar-nos d'una meravella aixi? Oblidant. No podem tenir massa coses al cap. Nomes existeix el present i no hi ha res per a recordar.
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present
uniqueness
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Jeanette Winterson |
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489a2ec
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On the top of the hill looking out over the town I wanted to see further than anybody had seen. That wasn't arrogance; it was desire. I was all desire, desire for life.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5d09e8c
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Let me read to you," said Roger Nowell. "It is a night for reading."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c48ad88
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Art is about the individual, the individual commitment not tethered to reward. For the maker, and later the reader or the viewer or the listener, there is no obvious reward. There is only the thing-in-itself, because you want it, because you're drawn to it. It speaks to the part of us that is fully human, the part that belongs only to ourselves, not mechanized, socialized, pacified, integrated, but voice-to-voice, across time, singing a son..
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writing
humanity
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Jeanette Winterson |
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106c59a
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On the one side there were those who claimed that love, if it be allowed bat all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house. On the other there were those who believed that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night.
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passion
romance
spirit
lust
soul
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Jeanette Winterson |
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277006e
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Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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038c6f0
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The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe.
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understanding
earth
dichotomies
map
globe
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Jeanette Winterson |
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99d9019
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Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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92a8954
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Our rate of conductivity is probably determined by an ability, learned or innate, to make the foreground into the background, so that the distractions of the everyday no longer take up our energy. Monks and contemplatives have tried to achieve this by withdrawing from the world---utter concentration, trance-like concentration, is what is needed. Passion, delirium, meditation, even out-of-body, are words we use to describe the heightened con..
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freedom
inspiration
mediation
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5cd3c16
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There is the sailor sea and the commercial sea, the oil-well sea and the fishy sea. The sea that tests the land through sublunary power. The rise and fall of the harbour sea and the sea that exists to make maps look prettier. But the functional sea is not the final sea. There is that other sea simply itself.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2c87e83
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I discovered from my time in the brother that men's members, if bitten off or otherwise severed, do not grow again. This seems a great mistake on the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking.
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men
nature
penises
indiscretion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2ac347f
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You can always tell a good woman by her sandwiches,
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1fb3256
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Las palabras son la parte del silencio que puede ser hablada
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silencio
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Jeanette Winterson |
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eef0f70
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Llegara el dia en que los barcos careceran de tripulacion, los aiones no tendran pilotos, las fabricas seran gestionadas por robots, y los ordenadores contestaran el telefono. ?Que sera entonces de la gente? - Si los barcos no hubieran tenido tripulacion cuando tu padre llego a puerto, tu madre no habria sido una deshonra - Y yo no habria nacido - Y no habrias sido huerfana - Si no hubiera sido huerfana, nunca habria conocido a Pew - ?Y eso..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6995a98
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He's only a dog. Yes but he has found me out.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2a40154
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There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and the seven seas but looking for a reason to stay.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8c92351
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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.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f98cd5c
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She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes were more modest -- but you don't know that until you have bought and sold for the ghost of your mother.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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559ce9c
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A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b3e8aa7
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The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority - of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too.
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reading
education
class
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Jeanette Winterson |
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07b9b4a
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My mother is very like William Blake, she has visions and dreams and she cannot always distinguish a flea's head from a king. Luckily she can't paint.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8892a64
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our outside loo, known as the Betty, was a good loo; whitewashed and compact with a flashlight hanging behind the door. I smuggled books in there to read them in secret, claiming constipation.
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loo
outside-toilet
toilet
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Jeanette Winterson |
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65fca93
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Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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33a4570
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Stia ea prea bine ca scriitorii sunt niste boemi obsedati de sex care incalcau regulile si nu se duceau la munca.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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29010b3
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Shakespeare," he thought as he scribbled away. "Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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98b1a20
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He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset 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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d6cbf15
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I'm telling you stories. Trust me. I
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ef7dfe7
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There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2715225
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I've thought of killing myself so many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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77e7a76
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I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life or the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.
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money
life
thatcherism
money-quotes
society
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Jeanette Winterson |
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690ca9a
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Avem nevoie de cuvinte pentru ca familiile nefericite sunt niste conspiratii ale tacerii. Cel care rupe tacerea nu este iertat niciodata.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a29ccdd
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We were the lucky ones, the notthese, we were the ones who had survived the aerial bombing and fire-clusters, the final flash. Regrettable, unavoidable, a war to end all wars, a war for democracy, a war for freedom, peaceful war. Sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes war is right. But to the broken and the dead, to the wounded and the maimed, to the exploded and the shrapnelshattered, to minds gone dark, to eyes that have seen agony no tea..
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sci-fi-romance
the-stone-gods
sci-fi
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b70f533
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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 I start to run?
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loss
memories
past
love
reminisce
trip
nostalgia
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Jeanette Winterson |
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32c1df9
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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, never enough garden for your love.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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061251b
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gifts -- that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0a001d3
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This is the city of disguises.
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Jeanette Winterson |