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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b32f89f | We get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we shouldn't let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c54963d | Whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| ef52db0 | There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have been confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out. | life | Jeanette Winterson | |
| b2e597a | He hates for hate's sake. There are people like that. People who have everything. Money, power, sex. When they have everything they play for more sophisticated stakes than the rest of us. There are no thrills left to that man. The sun will never rise and delight him. he will never be lost in a strange town and forced to ask his way. I can't buy him. I can't tempt him. He wants a life for a life. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 51d9b32 | I could gamble on another night, reduce myself a little more, but after the tenth night would come the eleventh and the twelfth and so on into the silent space that is the pain of never having enough. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| e87c3f3 | A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough. | religion | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 07d926c | I can't stay here. These wars will never end. Even if we get home, there'll be another war. I thought he'd end wars for ever, that's what he said. One more, he said, one more and then there'll be peace and it's always been one more. I want to stop now. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 1d588d2 | When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| e6ba191 | My mother was in charge of language. My father had never really learned to read - he could manage slowly, with his fingers on the line, but he had left school at twelve and gone to work at the Liverpool docks. Before he was twelve, no one had bothered to read to him. His own father had been a drunk who often took his small son to the pub with him, left him outside, staggered out hours later and walked home, and forgot my dad, asleep in a do.. | bible-reading | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 9f43644 | She wanted to kiss the hesitation of his throat. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 3fd2356 | De ce masura iubirii este pierderea ei? | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| a8dbc54 | I saw a lot of working class men and women - myself included - living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the church... The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| a2432d3 | It is necessary to go through life a little blunted, a little cloaked, how else to bear even a single day? The horror and the glory would overwhelm me. Papa used to talk about the story of the burning bush when God appears to Moses as a roar of fire. Moses asks to see God face to face and God tells him that to do so, even partially, even for a second, would kill him with its beauty and its power. 'Who shall look on God and live?' To Papa th.. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 52031ce | HE: History has no smell. ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it? HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 1ee1298 | Bombay. Cairo. Paris. New York. I've been to those places now. The curious thing is that no matter how different they are, people are all preoccupied with the same things, that is, the same thing; how to live. We have to eat, we want to make money, but in every pause the question returns: How shall I live? | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| b96cf7e | She was night-time and words were the dream. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 516b6a4 | People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 1c9a591 | Truth is a questioning place. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 1714233 | This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| ea13383 | Fools stay in love. I am a fool. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c09bf4b | We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 5c50eed | The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c457992 | Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame? | blame love | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 42ede39 | Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris. | novel | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 7503a87 | I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 105fa59 | Die Wahrheit aber ist, dieses Ware ist immer nur eine Erfindung. Ich kann nur die Entscheidungen treffen, die ich treffe, warum sich also qualen mit dem, was gewesen ware, wenn ich doch nur bewaltigen kann, was war?" "Die Ware-Inseln sind fur den Menschen unbewohnbar." | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 09a2f0b | Everyone knows a homosexual is no closer to being a woman than a rhinoceros. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 25bdf3e | Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 0e60471 | It works because the principle of personal space is always the same, whether you're fending off an elemental or someone's bad mood. It's a force field around yourself, and as long as our imagining powers are weak, it's useful to have something to remind us. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| afbf76a | I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| f7ab16f | My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion . . . | air-raid rats war | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 241e2f7 | She knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work. | truth writers | Jeanette Winterson | |
| e51ce5a | No one else was there, with the weather like this. If I still lived there, I'd be indoors too. It's a visitor's privilege to be foolish. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 77bfbff | I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher. | novel | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 8b971bb | there's no choice that doesn't mean a loss | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| ac0d1de | I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life. When I was upset I went roaming into the Pennines - all day on a jam sandwich and a bottle of milk. When I was locked outside, or the other favourite, locked in the coal-hole, I made up stories and forgot about the cold and the dark. I know these are ways of surviving, but maybe a refusal, any refusal, to be broken lets in en.. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c84cb9a | If there is such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 813873e | Of course people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things, so there's no need to take it personally. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| c945857 | Kom naar beneden!' Ik kwam naar beneden, en toen ik weer op de grond stond, gaf mijn moeder me twee klappen in mijn gezicht. Wat zijn dat voor spelletjes?' Ik wilde de Wildernis zien.' Er is daar niets. Dat weet je.' Als er niets is, kan het ook geen kwaad.' Niets is het gevaarlijkste dat er is.' Waarom?' Als er niets is, kun je iets bedenken. Je zult de leegte niet kun!nen verdragen. Het zal evengoed leeg zijn, maar je zult jezelf wijsmake.. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 854689c | Vertel me een verhaal, Silver. Wat voor verhaal? Het verhaal van wat daarna gebeurde. Dat hangt ervan af. Waarvan? Van hoe ik het vertel. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 010e6f2 | I hate this hospital. I sat in the car like this after my wife died. Staring out of the windscreen seeing nothing. The whole day passed and then it was night and nothing had changed because everything had changed. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| ee974bb | What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future. | memories metaphors time | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 05f64eb | We live as best we may in a world of worms. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 2201da2 | I shall have nowt to talk to now the baby is boiled. | Jeanette Winterson |