Jeanette Winterson Quotes

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The true nature of the world is energy not mass.

~ Jeanette Winterson

If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'.It might as well have said '27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON'.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether it’s solutions to those extra pounds you’re carrying, or to your thinning hair, or to your loss of appetite, loss of love. We are always looking for solutions, but actually what we are engaged in is a process throughout life during which you never get it right. You have to keep being open, you have to keep moving forward. You have to keep finding out who you are and how you are changing, and only that makes life tolerable.

~ Jeanette Winterson

There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.

~ Jeanette Winterson

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

~ Jeanette Winterson

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

~ Jeanette Winterson

At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.

~ Jeanette Winterson

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.

~ Jeanette Winterson

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

~ Jeanette Winterson

If the demons lived anywhere it was here.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I have ridden out all the storms,” said Shakespeare, “even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

~ Jeanette Winterson

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

Shakespeare,” he thought as he scribbled away. “Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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

What is luck', he said, 'but the ability to exploit accidents?

~ Jeanette Winterson

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

~ Jeanette Winterson

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.''Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course—as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.

~ Jeanette Winterson

There's no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I'll take a chance.

~ Jeanette Winterson

You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

~ Jeanette Winterson

We were the lucky ones, the notthese, we were the ones who had survived the aerial bombing and fire-clusters, the final flash. Regrettable, unavoidable, a war to end all wars, a war for democracy, a war for freedom, peaceful war. Sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes war is right. But to the broken and the dead, to the wounded and the maimed, to the exploded and the shrapnelshattered, to minds gone dark, to eyes that have seen agony no tears can wash away, it hardly matters that the dead language of war repeats itself through time. The bodies that can say nothing have the last word. What is it — the last word? No.No more war.

~ Jeanette Winterson

gifts — that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Why doesn't she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can't get warm... She won't be cold. She has the sun inside her.

~ Jeanette Winterson

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.

~ Jeanette Winterson

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

~ Jeanette Winterson

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

~ Jeanette Winterson

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

~ Jeanette Winterson