Jeanette Winterson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jeanette Winterson on Wise Famous Quotes.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

And what is memory but a rope slung across time?

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

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

I'm not a quitter.

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

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

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

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

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

There are voices and they must be heard.

moss that is concentrating on being green.

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land.

I said, "If we were good always would we be happy always?"
"No," said Grandmother.
"Then I shall be bad.

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.

What you fuck is much more important than how you write.

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.

I want to touch you.'
'And if you did touch me, what then?'
'I would find a language of beginning.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest.

Life is so simple when you're just doing your job.

do it from the heart or not at all.

And if the road leads nowhere?' He shrugged. 'Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere.

The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.

Bridges join but they also separate.

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

I was hungry, but I was nervous too. You were so new and I didn't want to frighten you away. I didn't want to frighten myself away.

Here's my life - I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed.

I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.

I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively.

I discover that grief means living with someone who is not there.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge.

Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.

Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

It is always a mistake to argue with a librarian.

This is the city of disguises.

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.

travelling the world and the seven seas

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

Under the night rug, the star rug, moon as lantern, man in the moon watching over us, dog star at his heels, we lay.

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

History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries.

Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

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.

Don't mix your heart with your liver.

Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?

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.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.

She was night-time and words were the dream.

The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

There's no such thing as a limited victory. You must protect what you have won. You must take is seriously.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Wrong to seal illogic with a kiss but I do it myself all the time.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories ... I can change the story. I am the story.

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.

What we notice in stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift.

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

I can change the story. I am the story.

I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine.

I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self.

It takes much longer to leave the psychic place than the physical place. (p.120)

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.

I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; stella maris of the upper air.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

When my mother heard about this, she was furious, and she crossed Nellie off her prayer list. My dad put her on his instead, so she didn't miss out.

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

I love her."
"Then you do not love the Lord."
"Yes, I love both of them."
"You cannot."
"I do.

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.

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

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

I don't care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that.

We gamble with the thought of winning. But it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

I was in those days all about the 'fuck you'. Fuck you for not recognising how great I am. I'll do it myself.

It is necessary to distinguish the chalk circle from the stone wall.

Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.

The trouble with books is that you don't know what's in them 'till is too late

Human beings often display emotions they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not display.

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.

I'm not club-able, you see. I don't like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I'd hate to join anything, however loosely.

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

I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.

My mother's eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.

Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.

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.

I love life. Life is too precious to me not to live it fully.