Jeanette Winterson Quotes

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

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

~ Jeanette Winterson

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

~ Jeanette Winterson

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

~ 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

What makes up a life, events or the recollection of events?How much of recollection is invention?Whose invention?

~ 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

Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?

~ Jeanette Winterson

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

~ Jeanette Winterson

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.

~ Jeanette Winterson

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.

~ Jeanette Winterson

...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.

~ Jeanette Winterson

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive...I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

~ 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

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

~ 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