Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 2

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.
Jeanette Winterson
And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?
Jeanette Winterson
Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.
Jeanette Winterson
I kissed her and forgot death.
Jeanette Winterson
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 are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.
Jeanette Winterson
I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.
Jeanette Winterson
Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.
Jeanette Winterson
I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.
Jeanette Winterson
We live as best we may in a world of worms.
Jeanette Winterson
She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, 'It's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.' That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear. She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well-wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, 'She's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.'This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the 'dead' part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended.
Jeanette Winterson
...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.
Jeanette Winterson
Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.
Jeanette Winterson
I can change the story. I am the story.
Jeanette Winterson
You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day.""You'll get older," said my mother, "that's what happens.""Then what happens?""You won't be able to find the treasure.""Will I be too old to look for it?""No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
When 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.
Jeanette Winterson
Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind. tI like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time – linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted – Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear time and enter real time. tTime is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised. tWhen I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed – for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. tSometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you. tWhy did I leave home when I was sixteen? It was one of those important choices that will change the rest of your life. When I look back it feels like I was at the borders of common sense, and the sensible thing to do would have been to keep quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later. tI have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. tAnd here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy. tYou are unhappy. Things get worse. tIt is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. tAnd then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’ tIn fact, they told you nothing.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.
Jeanette Winterson
There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.
Jeanette Winterson
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 open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction -don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end. (p.87)
Jeanette Winterson
...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.
Jeanette Winterson
I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.
Jeanette Winterson
When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.
Jeanette Winterson
What you think is the heart might well be another organ.
Jeanette Winterson
We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.
Jeanette Winterson
You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there.
Jeanette Winterson
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time.
Jeanette Winterson
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
Jeanette Winterson
In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.Feel for yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
Singing is my pleasure, but not in church, for the parson said the gargoyles must remain on the outside, not seek room in the choir stalls. So I sing inside the mountain of my flesh, and my voice is as slender as a reed and my voice has no lard in it. When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have been. But does it matter if the place cannot be mapped as long as I can still describe it?
Jeanette Winterson
I want to touch you.''And if you did touch me, what then?''I would find a language of beginning.
Jeanette Winterson
Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time that returns everything, changes everything. ..a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity and the beginning of another. …History is a madman's museum. I think I understand some of this, But it’s all subject to the tide. Unmoor the boat. Part miracle part madness. My life is a series of set sails and shipwrecks. I run aground I cut loose, the rim is dangerously near the waterline. I feel like a saint in a coracle. Head thrown back, sun on my throat. Unmoor the boat.
Jeanette Winterson
If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me.
Jeanette Winterson
I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them.
Jeanette Winterson
I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical.
Jeanette Winterson
If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.
Jeanette Winterson
You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
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. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies - unconscious strategies- to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too - sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.It takes courage to feel the feeling - and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.
Jeanette Winterson
This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.
Jeanette Winterson
He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
Jeanette Winterson
Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical.
Jeanette Winterson
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
Jeanette Winterson
Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.
Jeanette Winterson
We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
Jeanette Winterson
Be with someone you don't want to be without.
Jeanette Winterson
When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation....When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities.
Jeanette Winterson
Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.
Jeanette Winterson
The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
Jeanette Winterson
I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.
Jeanette Winterson
Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture
Jeanette Winterson
When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.
Jeanette Winterson
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here.
Jeanette Winterson