Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 3

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.
Jeanette Winterson
If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.
Jeanette Winterson
Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.
Jeanette Winterson
There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
Jeanette Winterson
In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.Feeling is frightening.
Jeanette Winterson
Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.
Jeanette Winterson
They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.
Jeanette Winterson
Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.''And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.
Jeanette Winterson
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?
Jeanette Winterson
I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.
Jeanette Winterson
Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me.
Jeanette Winterson
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
There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.
Jeanette Winterson
Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?
Jeanette Winterson
Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.
Jeanette Winterson
I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.
Jeanette Winterson
Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world.
Jeanette Winterson
The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.
Jeanette Winterson
There was a man here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories like a madman, so that as one ended another began. On the seventh day he had told all the stories he knew and that was when he began to tell himself as if he were a story, from the earliest beginnings to his green and deep misfortune. The story he told was of a man lost and found, not once, but many times, as he choked his way out of the waves. And the night fell, he saw the Cape Wrath light, only lit a week it was, but it was, and he knew that if he became the story of the light, he might be saved. With his last strength he began to paddle towards it, arms on either side of the spar, and in his mind the light became a shining rope, pulling him in. He took hold of it, tied it round his waist, and at that moment, the keeper saw him, and ran for the rescue boat.
Jeanette Winterson
Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.
Jeanette Winterson
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 town where everyone’s nightmares come true.
Jeanette Winterson
To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words.
Jeanette Winterson
That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
Jeanette Winterson
The words come at my call but who calls whom?
Jeanette Winterson
Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.
Jeanette Winterson
Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently
Jeanette Winterson
Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.
Jeanette Winterson
Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?
Jeanette Winterson
What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?
Jeanette Winterson
But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?
Jeanette Winterson
Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.
Jeanette Winterson
Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?
Jeanette Winterson
I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.
Jeanette Winterson
Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
Jeanette Winterson
And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
Jeanette Winterson
There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.
Jeanette Winterson
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
Jeanette Winterson
Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny.
Jeanette Winterson
The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.
Jeanette Winterson
Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.
Jeanette Winterson
the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.
Jeanette Winterson
The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
Jeanette Winterson
It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.
Jeanette Winterson
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
Jeanette Winterson
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.
Jeanette Winterson
He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.
Jeanette Winterson
Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.
Jeanette Winterson
And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
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
Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.
Jeanette Winterson
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 from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
Jeanette Winterson
Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.
Jeanette Winterson
When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.Jordan...I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.
Jeanette Winterson
The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.
Jeanette Winterson