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a36741a
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The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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c1f1e8d
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We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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71626db
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We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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522c3c3
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I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of 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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Jeanette Winterson |
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fd158e2
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In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d1b691f
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Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light...
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e21a4a8
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And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
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relationships
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Jeanette Winterson |
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b73d7ea
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Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.
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madness
health
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Jeanette Winterson |
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0ec7cc8
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And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman's fortune or one man's loss. And we can't know the lives of others. And we can't know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside the clocks. It takes ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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77e25c7
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Life was a pre-death experience.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ed2256e
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I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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952181b
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What sex are you?" Doesn't matter does it? After all that's your problem." If I keep you, what will happen?" You'll have a difficult, different time." Is it worth it?" That's up to you."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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31e5d28
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Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of it's own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as seperate as another continent. The work you do, if it has any meaning, passes to other hands. The day slides into a night's dreaming. True stories are the ones that lie ope..
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stories
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Jeanette Winterson |
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587cce1
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Happy ending are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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7b2a819
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Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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490acb9
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I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.
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feelings
head-and-heart
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e0f94d2
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Slightest accidents open up new worlds.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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9f4f8a2
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I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
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writing
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Jeanette Winterson |
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8556a93
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I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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74b1ae2
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What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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193234a
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When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.
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woman
sexing-the-cherry
jeanette-winterson
pregnancy
child
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Jeanette Winterson |
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24a183f
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What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a09a40d
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There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, writte..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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223db62
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The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world. That woman-a pieta. Those men, rough angels with an unknown message. The children holding hands, spanning time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3470b30
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I love badly. That is too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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42a9dc6
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Louise, I would gladly fire the past for you, go and not look back. I have been reckless before, never counting the cost, oblivious to the cost. Now, I've done the sums ahead. I know what it will mean to redeem myself from the accumulations of a lifetime. I know and I don't care. You set before me a space uncluttered by association. It might be a void or it might be a release. Certainly I want to take the risk. I want to take the risk becau..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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3217031
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Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d0fe37d
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Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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26602e7
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only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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2e3c1e0
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Today, the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love -- all love -- love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness ..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d273339
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For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.
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fate
sexing-the-cherry
jeanette-winterson
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Jeanette Winterson |
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761a028
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A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
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reading
imagination
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Jeanette Winterson |
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539c9d9
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I asked him why he was a priest, and he said if you have to work for anyone, an absentee boss is best.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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ff16499
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You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
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relationships
love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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5dc5528
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She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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6886ae7
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Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.
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parental-love
unconditional-love
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Jeanette Winterson |
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98ae47a
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Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
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homeland
home
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Jeanette Winterson |
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d95c81e
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I looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself. I was up to my chin when the shout came, and I will never forget it. Never. For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering -- when I can no longer speak, hear me.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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f8b3f51
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It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.
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words
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Jeanette Winterson |
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044783a
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It was a long story, and like most of the stories in the world, never finished. There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.
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Jeanette Winterson |
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039ca44
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I love you." "You've loved other people but you still left them." "It's not that simple." "I don't want to be another scalp on your pole."
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Jeanette Winterson |
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277f3ed
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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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Jeanette Winterson |
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c4e7696
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Two hundred miles from the surface of the earth there is no gravity. The laws of motion are suspended. You could turn somersaults slowly slowly, weight into weightlessness, nowhere to fall. As you lay on your back paddling in space you might notice your feet had fled your head. You are stretching slowly slowly, getting longer, your joints are slipping away from their usual places. There is no connection between your shoulder and your arm. Y..
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Jeanette Winterson |
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a428dd7
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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 life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloa..
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life
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Jeanette Winterson |