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7e2163f
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The photographer frames the shot, writers frame their world.
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book-writing
feminism
lgbt
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f8288f3
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Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I'm warm.
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book-lovers
book-writing
feminism
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9ed732f
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Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version.. Love is full strenght. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.
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feminism
love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d841675
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She grew in secret, away from their eyes. Outwardly she was obedient and loving, but inside she was feeding a hunger--
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passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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fccf23f
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el amor deja una herida que a su vez deja una cicatriz.
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purpura
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Jeanette Winterson |
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93dd8ec
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El amor es tan fuerte como la muerte.
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purpura
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7d16f00
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I am desperately looking the other way so that love won't see me.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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4eb5862
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It is snowing. In the English language we do not know anything about the 'it' that is snowing. It might be God. Maybe not. Anyway. It. Is. Snowing.
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winter
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9bec75c
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If I am honest I will admit that I have always wanted to avoid love. Yes give me romance, give me sex, give me fights, give me all the parts of love but not the simple single word which is so complex and demands the best of me this hour this minute this forever.
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language
love
words
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Jeanette Winterson |
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189f5b4
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If haunting is anything, perhaps that's what it is; time in the wrong place.
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hauntings
paranormal
supernatural
time
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e1fd7ce
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In the lives of saints I look for confirmation of excess. To them it is not strange to spend nights on a mountain or to forgo food. For them, the visionary and the everyday coincide. Above all, they have no domestic virtues, preferring intensity to comfort. Despite their inhospitable ways, they ferment with unexpected life, like those bleak railway cuttings that host horizontal dandelions. They know there is no passion without pain.
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intensity
pain
passion
religion
saints
visionaries
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Jeanette Winterson |
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306f883
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Stop thinking," she said. "The more you think, the faster you cut your own throat."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5ade18b
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1. Men are easy to please but are not pleased for long before some new novelty must delight them. 2. Men are easy to make passionate but are unable to sustain it. 3. Men are always seeking soft women but find their lives in ruins without strong women. 4. Men must be occupied at all times otherwise they make mischief. 5. Men deem themselves weighty and women light. Therefore it is simple to tie a stone round their necks and drown them should..
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gender-relations
men
money
passion
perception
power
rules
trust
women
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Jeanette Winterson |
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29ff3a3
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I had been agitating for a pet for some time. In my head I had a white rabbit called Ezra who bit people who ignored me. Ezra's pelt was as white as the soul in heaven but his heart was black...
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evil
good
pets
rabbits
vengeance
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2db3471
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El centro comercial no es nuestro verdadero hogar, ni un espacio publico, aunque, a medida que desaparecen las librerias, los jardines, los parques, los museos y los polideportivos, la falsa amabilidad de los centros comerciales sea el unico espacio que queda para muchos, aparte de las calles.
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soledad
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Jeanette Winterson |
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940b817
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El perro corria al lado de chico, y contemplo en el cielo despejado los perros estelares, frios y bellos, y supo que, pidas lo que pidas, no se puede pedir nada mejor que el amor
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animales
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Jeanette Winterson |
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eded18d
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I made him walk on a lead and he jumped for joy, the way creatures do, and children do and adults don't do, and spend their lives wondering where the leap went.
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children
dogs
growing-up
joy
jumping-for-joy
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9bcbe68
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I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder.
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gender
hatred
men
women
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Jeanette Winterson |
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05803b9
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The future is intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was.
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future
past
perception
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Jeanette Winterson |
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eeff0b7
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Invisible worlds, or worlds that are supposed to be invisible interest me. I like to see the effort it takes for some people to make things go smoothly for other people. Don't misunderstand me; mostly I'm part of the invisible world myself.
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maintenance
unseen-work
work
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3a9f57a
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Love affairs are discoveries of new worlds.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9b7ed25
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I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn't interested in a little black girl's dreams.
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aging
anger
dreams
hope
pity
youth
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Jeanette Winterson |
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08a715b
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Dreams were so tiring that she wondered how anybody ever dared to go to sleep at night.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d5e2728
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A good job, money, more money, travel, happiness. Christmas-time swivelled the lens and brought these things into focus. If you had some, all, any of these things you could feel especially pleased with yourself over the twelve days of feasting and family. If you didn't have some, all, any of these things you felt the lack more keenly. You felt like an outsider.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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279a7f0
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He liked city walking. He didn't want to have to go to that place called countryside to take a walk. He wanted to stuff his hands in his pockets, set his internal compass vaguely east or south and wander till he was tired enough to get the bus home.
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walking
wandering
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0a28c2e
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The Pope is often an embarrassment. Each Pope nurses his own foibles and follies, pet truths and pet hates, and all must be accommodated within the seamless seemingly unchanging whole of Catholic Truth. Often the Popes contradict one another, and even more often, they contradict the great masters they reanimate to support their own certainties. The theologians take it as a joke. They are interested in the power of the Church and her authori..
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hypocrisy
pope
power
religion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0ff7d89
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The school song at Accrington High School for Girls was 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,' a terrible choice for an all-girls' school, but one that helped turn me into a feminist. Where were the famous women--indeed any women--and why weren't we praising them? I vowed to myself that I would be famous and that I would come back and be praised.
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feminism
men
praise
recognition
women
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b8aceae
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The planets are bodies in the solar system and so are we. You and I in elliptical orbs circling life. It is life we want, but we daren't come too close for fear it might burn us away, this life in its intensity.
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life
orbiting
orbits
planets
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3c0c7de
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In what way am I any better? She is smug. I am cynical. She is puffed-up. I am punctured. I watch her gamely finding the energy to thrash about on life's greasy surface, while I lie paralysed, croaking about another life I think I can see.
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life
smugness
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Jeanette Winterson |
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73f4be2
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There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable.
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creativity
death
existence
life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9c72548
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But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us. This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That's the problem--the awful thing is you.
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healing
life
recovery
redemption
self-help
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2ffabb6
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I keep seeing my life darting off in the different directions it could have taken, as chance and circumstance, temperament and desire, open and close, open and close gates, routes, roadways. And yet there feels like an inevitability to who I am--just as of all the planets in all the universes, planet blue, this planet Earth, is the one that is home.
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decisions
directions
inevitability
life
personality
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Jeanette Winterson |
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bccf5b9
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She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.
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mothers
mysteries
relationships
understanding
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6858225
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What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events? How much of recollection is invention? Whose invention?
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jeanette-winterson
literature
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ea639a3
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Her favourite song was 'God Has Blotted Them Out,' which was meant to be about sins, but really was about anyone who had ever annoyed her, which was everyone. She just didn't like anyone and she just didn't like life. Life was a burden to be carried as far as the grave and then dumped. Life was a Vale of Tears. Life was a pre-death experience.
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death
god
life
misanthropy
religion
revenge
vengeance
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e0367f4
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It was a dark gift but not a useless one.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5af0809
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She laughed. "What about your wings?" she said. "How can you forget those when the stumps are still deep in your shoulder-blades?" I didn't say anything. In the Bible only the angels have wings; the rest of us have to wait to be rescued."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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84a9760
|
My own father came out of the sea and went back that way... His splintered hull shored him long enough to drop anchor inside my mother.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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202a5b7
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The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen. But I was alive. And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the pieces of my broken mind.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f0264f5
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Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life - to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life. And extremes - whether of dullness or fury - successfully prevent feeling.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f3d0a8c
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But as I try and understand how life works--and why some people cope better than others with adversity--I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream...
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coping
happiness
life
love-of-life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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53d280f
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It never happened, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything--the miracle--is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.
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miracles
possibilities
self-reliance
transformation
understanding
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6dcb0e7
|
She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her. I think I do know her now, but it is too late.
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loneliness
relationships
solitude
understanding
|
Jeanette Winterson |
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39a46ae
|
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.
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Jeanette Winterson |