Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

~ Jeanette Winterson

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

~ Jeanette Winterson

St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.

~ Jeanette Winterson

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

~ Jeanette Winterson

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

~ Jeanette Winterson

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?

~ Jeanette Winterson

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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 space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

~ Jeanette Winterson

What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. 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

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff

~ Jeanette Winterson

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

~ Jeanette Winterson

Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren’t going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The wider we read the freer we become.

~ Jeanette Winterson

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The free man never thinks of escape.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

~ Jeanette Winterson

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

~ Jeanette Winterson

...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down

~ Jeanette Winterson

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

~ Jeanette Winterson

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays

~ Jeanette Winterson

There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that.There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you.Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

~ Jeanette Winterson

Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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