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b6b09fa
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You'll get over it...' It's the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to greive over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ff6731a
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Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7ad4fc7
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What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.
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sex
passion
taboo
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a8a9d1f
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A tough life needs a tough language--and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers--a language powerful enough to say how it is.
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words
literature
reading
poetry
life
language
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Jeanette Winterson |
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76f416d
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There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a51ea43
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I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7c6b296
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Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there's no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you'll find millions like it in Misery. This is the ..
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sadness
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9390a52
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Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or do..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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adf855f
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We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d505122
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No. 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.
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passion
the-heart
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0548fa1
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The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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cae5168
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I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.... I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape -- but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community -- to society?
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industrialisation
industrialization
working-class
individualism
society
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f1aee68
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every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d4ea6e2
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Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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24f4637
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Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.
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memory-loss
memory
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Jeanette Winterson |
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042e0bd
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There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that. There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you. Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?
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work
love
effort
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ef6aee9
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By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.
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life
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7210f6a
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I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a715ca6
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Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
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living
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2fb0b7c
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I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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512e2aa
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I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water a..
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mind
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8d7869a
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The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3cbe214
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August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d40d7af
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I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d76ad38
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Breathe in, breath out. Oxygen is carcinogenic and likely puts a limit on our life span. It would be unwise though, to try to extend life by not breathing at all. Which of us doesn't do it? Either we loll in anaerobic stupor, too afraid to fill our lungs with risky beauty, or we roll out fire like dragons, destroying the world we love. I try not to burn up my world with rage. It is so hard.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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33a1d17
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I wasn't reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A-Z. But this was different. I read [in, by T.S. Eliot]: I started to cry. (...)The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family--the first one was not my fault, but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault. I was confused about se..
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reading
poetry
power-of-words
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Jeanette Winterson |
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10b3b85
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If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a3f13ce
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I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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1601bec
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Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3ac8be2
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I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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144dfab
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You have a dress with a decolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6a7d81f
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The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea. Or the people who found Atlantis.
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feminism
courage
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Jeanette Winterson |
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eeaeb22
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And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a se..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a19d222
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Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.
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passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a7e90ef
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A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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04ff3bb
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Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5c87e00
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I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9012c75
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I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.
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flight
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0d3bd9f
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And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and ar..
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kiss
love
the-passion
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Jeanette Winterson |
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46a483d
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I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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dead11a
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What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2a5b625
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People say the magic has gone out of the moon now that someone's stood on it. I don't think so. It would take more than a man's foot to steal the moon.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5d02c3b
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They say this city can absorb anyone. It does seem that every nationality is here in some part. 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. I am not looking, I've found what it is I want... I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It mean..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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450db90
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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.
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writing
inspirational
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Jeanette Winterson |