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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b9ed5c8 | I guess I'm afraid of not being like other people. No, that's not true. I'm not afraid of not being like other people. I'm afraid I won't find anybody who doesn't mind me not being like other people. I'm not ambitious for money or power. I want to find some real way to live. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| d57b146 | I've thought of killing myself 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. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 03ab6e9 | I walked into you. The white room is a hospital. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 9a141b4 | I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silences. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody as been there for us and deep-dived the words. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| cba2ca8 | Time is a boomerang, not an arrow. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 34a004c | Dupa cateva experimente simple, a devenit clar ca oamenii care abandonasera gravitatia fusesera, la randul lor, abandonati de ea." (pag 143)" | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 3a5e835 | I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves. | rural urban | Jeanette Winterson | |
| fbfcb1a | And I suppose the saddest thing for me, thinking about | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| cd8268f | My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, "David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat." | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| ae92fa8 | Babies are frightening -- raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| d858474 | One of us hadn't finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you're not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why.. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 473c800 | There's no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear. | defeat victory | Jeanette Winterson | |
| a074704 | Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn't our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets | celebration collaboration community neo-liberalism public-space | Jeanette Winterson | |
| b37c090 | For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion--in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots--apologies there, Spike--but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 3fecd57 | 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 our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 9244779 | I told my version - faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as hero like any shipwreck story. It was a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not altogether human, and rarely kind. And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not surviv.. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 9ec8655 | I walked round the block thinking I'd think about it, but my legs were heading home, and sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| efe1215 | I put the words into a flask and flung them out to sea. Flung them far out from me, made through myself, but not myself. Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine. The world is packed tight with fools. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 9e27e5d | 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. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| cb2b174 | Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos- and it's pain. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| e65542d | You're drunk." "That's right I am. I'm fifty-three and I'm as wild as a Welshman with a leek up his arse. Fifty-three. Old slag Gail. What right has she to poke her nose into your shining armour? That's what you're thinking isn't it honey?" | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c4be396 | When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 5d2b53e | There's this world,' she banged the wall graphically, 'and there's this world,' she thumped her chest. 'If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| a1f740a | Going mad is the beginning of a process, it's not meant to be the end result. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 735c6f4 | The important things. Where should I find them? In the detail, like God? In the risk, like the Devil? | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c05175d | We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it. | humour novels | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 4c500ef | Take two people. Slice lengthways. Boil with the lid on. Add a marriage, a past, another woman. Sugar to taste. Pass through a chance meeting. Lubricate sparingly. Serve on a bed of - or is it in a bed of -? Use fresh and top with raw emotion. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 9b73584 | Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open -- the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 4869bdf | I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| b7918df | I said, "If we were good always would we be happy always?" "No," said Grandmother. "Then I shall be bad." | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c5326aa | In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 7adbd9b | I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse. I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live. | meaning-of-life | Jeanette Winterson | |
| fdc6513 | How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floot is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 9459cd9 | I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy. I started to cry. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 0310457 | 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. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c107b4b | Gertrude drives on. She says, 'Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it, | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 8583579 | It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 6a966b3 | The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own. | libraries | Jeanette Winterson | |
| cb9dddc | Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- "When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose." | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| ceda0ac | Then, as now, nobody talked about the legacy of Empire. Britain had colonised, owned, occupied or interfered with half the world. We had carved up some countries and created others. When some of the world we had made by force wanted something in return, we were outraged. | colonialist-britain | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 32fd493 | Soldiers and women. That's how the world is. Any other role is temporary. Any other role is a gesture. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 5eb9e81 | Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the saem 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 life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life. | life | Jeanette Winterson | |
| a752bb7 | Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. | passion | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 7c860a4 | We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent. | Jeanette Winterson |