Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE is an English writer. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. (Jeanette Winterson Quotes)

“About The Passion and about fiction versus lying, I realise all the obvious things about invention as a way of getting at a deeper truth, and lying as a way of avoiding any truth at all or, worse, creating a nightmare world where nothing is as it seems, where nothing can be depended upon – we know human minds can’t cope with that, and then we instinctively cling to the ‘strong man’, who is usually the biggest liar of the lot.”
Jeanette Winterson
Love Quotes

“After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, “I fuck therefore I am”.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art and Lies

“All of one’s life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn’t poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“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 so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“Are you like all other men after all? The poor should have no justice, just as they have no food, no decent shelter, no regular livelihood? Is that how your saviour Jesus treated the poor?”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment’s apotheosis.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects

“As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“As your lover describes you, so you are.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“At that time I could not imagine what would become of me, and I didn’t care. It was not judgement day, but another morning.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home-they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“But, Mistress, do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“Calling things by their right names is more than giving them an identity bracelet or a label, or a serial number. We summon a vision. Naming is power.” (Jeanette Winterson Quotes)
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“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”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“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
Art and Lies

“Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“Don’t regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“Dreams were so tiring that she wondered how anybody ever dared to go to sleep at night.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“Even being good has unintended consequences. You’re only human, after all.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“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
Art and Lies

“Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“Every new beginning prompts a return.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Stone Gods

“Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“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…but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Stone Gods

“For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“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
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Going mad is the beginning of a process, it’s not meant to be the end result.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“He doesn’t take a photo or a video because he wants to remember — by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can’t capture.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“He scarred her arm…but she did not care because she loved him and she knew that love leaves a wound that leaves a scar.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“Heterosexual choice is allowed to be the background of a writer’s life; its wallpaper. So is maleness. And whiteness. Step out of that and you will be called a feminist writer, a lesbian writer, a gay writer, a woman writer. A black writer. You will never be called a heterosexual writer or a male writer or a white writer. Those signifiers are absorbed into the single word ‘writer’.” (Jeanette Winterson Quotes)
Jeanette Winterson
Love Quotes

“How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“Human beings often display emotions they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not display.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Stone Gods

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? He said.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“I asked him why he was a priest, and he said if you have to work for anyone, an absentee boss is best.”

“I became my own ladder and trapdoor to other worlds. I was my own disguise. The sight of a figure, far off, on some journey of his own, was enough to spark my imagination towards a tragedy or a miracle.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn’t interested in a little black girl’s dreams.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it’s proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“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
Gut Symmetries

“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art and Lies

“I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“I had thought about everything carefully before I had agreed to him. I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated; his heart and mine.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“I have a head for heights it’s true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“I have a theory that every time you make an important decision, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I have learned, painfully, over the years that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“I 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.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“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
Art and Lies

“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 Quotes)
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“I live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“I made him walk on a lead and he jumped for joy, the way creatures do, and children do and adults don’t do, and spend their lives wondering where the leap went.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover’s dreams.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What’s the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“I return to problems i can’t solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can’t be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“I think of love as a force of nature-as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“I think we are worlds compressed into human form.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“I tried to copy my parents, as monkeys do, but they were trying to copy me, looking to the child for the energy and hope they had long since lost.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“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
The Gap of Time

“I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“I was angry. Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can’t be logical about.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“I was never bored except in the company of others.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“If there are only four possible endings to any story – comedy, tragedy, revenge and forgiveness ”
Jeanette Winterson
Love Quotes

“If there is another life he will find her there.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects

“If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“I’m always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“I’m not afraid of what I am. I’m afraid I will see what I am not.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art and Lies

“In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“Invisible worlds, or worlds that are supposed to be invisible interest me. I like to see the effort it takes for some people to make things go smoothly for other people. Don’t misunderstand me; mostly I’m part of the invisible world myself.” (Jeanette Winterson Quotes)
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“Is it failure for morning to become afternoon?”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“It is necessary to distinguish the chalk circle from the stone wall.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“It is no use trying to assume again the state of innocence and acceptance of the animal or the child. This time it has to be conscious. To circle about in such gladness as his, is the effort of a whole lifetime.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“It is not always possible to forgive oneself. And sometimes you make a choice to do something, knowing that you must do it, and that forgiveness is impossible.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“It is the poet who goes further than any human scientist. The poet who with her dredging net must haul up difficult things and return them to the present.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects

“It is true that on bright days we are happy. That is true because the sun on the eyelids effects chemical changes in the body. The sun also diminishes the pupils to pinpricks, letting the light in less. When we can hardly see we are most likely to fall in love.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“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
Lighthousekeeping

“It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“It’s better to think of my life like that— part miracle, part madness. It’s better if I accept that I can’t control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“I’ve lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“Life has never been All or Nothing- it’s All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Stone Gods

“Life was a pre-death experience.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people kept fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Stone Gods

“Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art… is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar… We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“Love is as strong as death.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“Love is not a pristine planet before contaminants and pollutants, before the arrival of Man. Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“Love’s lengthways splits the heart in two – the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”’ That’s from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“Moon’s gravitational pull means that earth doesn’t wobble too much. Scientists call it obliquity. The moon holds us fast.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“My mother has often been labelled as strange but that’s because she says things that people can’t possibly believe. Mostly she’s right.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you’ll come to me.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“None can know the human mind. No, not if he read every thought man ever wrote. Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness.”
Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein

“Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Only humans can know what it means to strip a human being of being human.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“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
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“Perhaps it is true that the world is made new again every day but our minds are not. The clamp that holds me will not let me go.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. “I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“So light a candle to the dead. And light a candle to miracles, however unlikely, and pray that you recognise yours. And light a candle to the living; the world of friendship and family that means so much. And light a candle to the future; that it may happen and not be swallowed up by darkness. And light a candle to love.” (Jeanette Winterson Quotes)
Jeanette Winterson
Love Quotes

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn’t matter that it’s night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It’s not that time stops or that it hasn’t started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“That night, I knew I would get away, better myself. Not because I despised who I was, but because I did not know who I was. I was waiting to be invented. I was waiting to invent myself.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“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
Weight

“The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can’t describe myself I can’t ask for help.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“The dark forest looked on fire. The trees were lit up like funeral pyres. She thought she saw bodies strapped to the trees, burning, burning, burning.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“The grey city and its lost hearts force its way between myself and my healing.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects

“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
Gut Symmetries

“The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what’s in front of us in the service of what’s lost.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Gap of Time

“The planets are bodies in the solar system and so are we. You and I in elliptical orbs circling life. It is life we want, but we daren’t come too close for fear it might burn us away, this life in its intensity.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“The point about food is that a lot of it used to be left-overs and recycling.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“The Romantics didn’t need [the bible] because they found their own fire; but almost every other quasi-revolt has gone back to it, because when the heart revolts, it wants outrageous things that cannot possibly be factual. Robes and incense and larger-than-life and miracles and heroes.”
Jeanette Winterson
Boating for Beginners

“The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love’s nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love’s fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe – no way to see what’s inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Stone Gods

“The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art and Lies

“The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer’s fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art and Lies

“There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night.”
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“There’s no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take is seriously.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“There’s so little wonder left in the world because we’ve seen everything one way or another’.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” (Jeanette Winterson Quotes)
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.”

“Time is a boomerang, not an arrow.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“Time is what shields us from eternity.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“Time was my Medusa. Time was turning me to stone.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there’s nothing there.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“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
Art Objects

“True art, when it happens to us, challenges the ‘I’ that we are. A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don’t want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?”
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects

“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
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Truth is a questioning place.”
Jeanette Winterson
Love Quotes

“Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Until we learn to stop dying Tom, we have to live with the consequences. There’s no room for the dead unless you treat them as ornamental.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“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
Gut Symmetries

“Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.”
Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“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
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“We gamble with the thought of winning. But it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“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
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“We live as best we may in a world of worms.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in… It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects

“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
Sexing the Cherry

“We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. If was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it.” (Jeanette Winterson Quotes)
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

“Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“We’re humans, not machines. We have bad days. We have mental difficulties. We are inspired, yet we fail. We are not linear. We have hearts that break and souls we don’t know what to do with. We kill and destroy but we build and make possible too. We’ve been to the moon and invented computers. We outsource most things but we still have to live with ourselves. We’re pessimists who believe it’s too late so what the hell? We’re the comeback kids in love with second chances. And every New Year is another chance.”
Jeanette Winterson
Christmas Days

“What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“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.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“What if?’ has no power against ‘What if not?’ The not of you is unbearable. I must have you.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook

“What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.”
Jeanette Winterson
Weight

“What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Stone Gods

“What you fuck is much more important than how you write.”
Jeanette Winterson
Art Objects

“What you risk reveals what you value.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.”
Jeanette Winterson
Sexing the Cherry

“When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.”
Jeanette Winterson
Lighthousekeeping

“When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“When you dig under the surface, past the necessities, men and women don’t mix.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go… So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself.”
Jeanette Winterson
Boating for Beginners

“Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.”
Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

“Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can’t be logical about.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion

“Why is the measure of love loss?”
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Witchery popery popery witchery – all the same thing.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Daylight Gate

“Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.”
Jeanette Winterson
The World and Other Places

“You can change everything about yourself – your name, your home, your skin color, your gender, even your parents, your private history – but you can’t change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Stone Gods

“You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive.”
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion