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7c3c47e
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What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9a9425b
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It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.
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passion
obsession
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Jeanette Winterson |
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bff04b3
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I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.
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displaced
hero
longing
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b67f302
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We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.
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painful-memories
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ea035f6
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I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8f482af
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After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, "I fuck therefore I am"."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3f95759
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When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me. He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change wa..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b9e7493
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When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b32eaa2
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What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside a..
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humanity
education
love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4eed9fa
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Don't lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone's little home.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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34f3d7e
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In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.' Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest. Feel for yourself.
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love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e6c5418
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Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6e89ea2
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Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and m..
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life
stories
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Jeanette Winterson |
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bc40b36
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The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do now know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That's what I'll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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377f07d
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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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19e3789
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Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars. I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3e03ebb
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I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.
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perseverance
living
hope
life
determination
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f4645ff
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When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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89fec32
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To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
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feelings
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7bb9fdc
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the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.
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understanding
fate
self-discovery
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Jeanette Winterson |
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703761a
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Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There's no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c8437e2
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A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6e3d395
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I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.
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solitude
love
longing
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Jeanette Winterson |
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15a5aa8
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Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
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worth
pain
love
heartache
hurt
memory
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Jeanette Winterson |
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198ac47
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Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.
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fate
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a10448e
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She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.
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sex
passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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fed89e0
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Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.
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passion
soul
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6377689
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I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ca0ca7c
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She was a monster, but she was my monster.
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mothers
monsters
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a321133
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In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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24c52d0
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Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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90224b0
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Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ebabc70
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You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b3fa80b
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Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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91d615c
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What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts f..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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37a0fc0
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In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e515c1f
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Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?
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reality
sexing-the-cherry
jeanette-winterson
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9c999c3
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Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.
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time
lies
reality
past
truth
untruths
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6a77038
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I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c08e028
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Pursuing happiness, and I did, and still do, is not at all the same 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 lifelong, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life. There's the hap- ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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85ba440
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No emotion is the final one.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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16a2527
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to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d73de0e
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Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c990c73
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The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.
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love
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Jeanette Winterson |