Jeanette Winterson Quotes

“Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“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, The Passion

“My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs. Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she's do what most people do when confronted with something they don't understand. Panic.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“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

“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, Art and Lies

“Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“...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, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“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, Art and Lies

“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

“Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.'

I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.

But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Memories separated in time are often recalled side by side-there's an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the diary dates and everything to do with the feeling.
Remembering isn't like visiting a museum: Look! There's the long-gone object in a glass case. Memory isn't an archive. Even a simple memory is a cluster. Something that seemed so insignificant at the time suddenly becomes the key when we remember it at a particular time later. We're not liars or self-deceivers-OK, we are all liars and self-deceivers, but it's a fact that our memories change as we do.
Some memories, though, don't seem to change a all. They are sticky with pain. And even when we are not, consciously, remembering our memories, they seem to remember us. We can't shake free of their effect.
There's a great-term for that-the old present. These things happened in the past, but they're riding right up front with us every day. (245-6)”
― Jeanette Winterson, Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

“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, Art and Lies

“What other places are there in the world than those discovered on a lover’s body?”
― Jeanette Winterson

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

“In my country there are no gods left. The Romans have driven them out. There are some who say that they have hidden themselves in the mountains, but I do not believe it. Three nights I have been on the mountains seeking them everywhere. I did not find them. And at last I called them by their names, and they did not come. I think they are dead.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

“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, The Stone Gods

“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, Art and Lies

“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, Art and Lies

“But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“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, Art and Lies

“Sempre pensamos que aquilo de que precisamos para transformar tudo — o milagre — está em outro lugar, mas muitas vezes está ali, bem ao nosso lado. Algumas vezes, o milagre somos nós mesmos.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?