Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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

There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

~ 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

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

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

~ 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

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

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

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

~ 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

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

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

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

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

~ 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

Be with someone you don't want to be without.

~ 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

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

~ 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

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

~ 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

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

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

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

~ 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

You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.

~ 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

I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them.

~ Jeanette Winterson