Top 100 Jeanette Winterson Quotes
#1. I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.
Colin Meloy
#2. I love Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. 'The Passion' is my favourite book.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
#3. He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
Jeanette Winterson
#4. My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.
Paloma Faith
#5. I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.
Jeanette Winterson
#6. Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations.
Jeanette Winterson
#8. 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
#10. Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.
Jeanette Winterson
#11. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that someone who is ignored and overlooked will expand to the point where they have to be noticed, even if the noticing is fear and disgust.
Jeanette Winterson
#12. Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.
Jeanette Winterson
#14. When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go ... So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
#15. 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
#16. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Jeanette Winterson
#17. We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.
Jeanette Winterson
#18. Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.
Jeanette Winterson
#20. 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
#23. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.
Jeanette Winterson
#24. 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?
Jeanette Winterson
#25. Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
#26. My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.
Jeanette Winterson
#27. It is no use trying to assume again the state of innocence and acceptance of the animal or the child. This time it has to be conscious. To circle about in such gladness as his, is the effort of a whole lifetime.
Jeanette Winterson
#28. We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.
Jeanette Winterson
#30. I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
Jeanette Winterson
#31. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.
Jeanette Winterson
#32. One just spends as much money as one has. Very peculiar that! You never actually have any money. You think, If I had this much money ten years ago, I would have thought I was amazingly rich, but I still manage to spend it all and not have any left.
Jeanette Winterson
#33. Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
Jeanette Winterson
#34. Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.
Jeanette Winterson
#35. The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.
Jeanette Winterson
#36. Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!
Jeanette Winterson
#37. What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?
Jeanette Winterson
#39. What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.
Jeanette Winterson
#40. The journey is about coming home ... There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail. (p. 220,222)
Jeanette Winterson
#41. Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.
Jeanette Winterson
#42. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices under water.
Jeanette Winterson
#43. My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o'clock. Perhaps that's why I try and have my crises in the evening.
Jeanette Winterson
#45. Infatuation. First Love. Lust.
My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.
Jeanette Winterson
#46. The end of every game is an anti-climax. What you thought you would feel you don't feel, what you thought was so important isn't any more. It's the game that's exciting.
Jeanette Winterson
#48. 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
#49. I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.
Jeanette Winterson
#50. The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.
Jeanette Winterson
#53. 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
#54. The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
Jeanette Winterson
#55. There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.
Jeanette Winterson
#56. You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not.
Jeanette Winterson
#57. 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.
Jeanette Winterson
#58. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough
Jeanette Winterson
#59. I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
Jeanette Winterson
#60. Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
Jeanette Winterson
#62. I had thought about everything carefully before I had agreed to him. I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated; his heart and mine.
Jeanette Winterson
#63. This is a quantum universe,' said Spike, 'neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.
Jeanette Winterson
#64. Manchester is in the south of the north of England.
Its spirit has a contrariness in it
a south and north bound up together
at once untamed and unmetropolitan; at the same time, connected and wordly.
Jeanette Winterson
#65. Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.
Jeanette Winterson
#67. Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off.
Jeanette Winterson
#68. Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.
Jeanette Winterson
#69. To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.
Jeanette Winterson
#70. Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people kept fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained
Jeanette Winterson
#72. What the myths say, is that you have to be the hero of your own life. You're the one who has to take charge of who you are, you're the one who has to take control. And also, you're the one who can bring something to the community.
Jeanette Winterson
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
Jeanette Winterson
#77. The people who decided in their wisdom that we're all going to go over to ebooks, they are not readers. These are technical people. These are people who think that somehow this is progress. It isn't. It's regressive.
Jeanette Winterson
#79. I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?
Jeanette Winterson
#81. I want to get to the end and feel that I've done all I could, given the limitations and given the opportunities.
Jeanette Winterson
#82. We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.
Jeanette Winterson
#83. One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone.
Jeanette Winterson
#84. Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?
Jeanette Winterson
#85. When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry.
Jeanette Winterson
#86. Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.
Jeanette Winterson
#87. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.
Jeanette Winterson
#88. The dark forest looked on fire. The trees were lit up like funeral pyres. She thought she saw bodies strapped to the trees, burning, burning, burning.
Jeanette Winterson
#89. 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.
Jeanette Winterson
#90. Writers always put themselves into their work. But you can't just untangle it and take it back to its source.
Jeanette Winterson
#91. August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.
Jeanette Winterson
#93. Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
Jeanette Winterson
#94. As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
#96. As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.
Jeanette Winterson
#97. I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
Jeanette Winterson
#98. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
Jeanette Winterson
#99. What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.
Jeanette Winterson
#100. In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.
Jeanette Winterson
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