Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 2

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

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 from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

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

And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?

The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I'll take a chance.

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

Be with someone you don't want to be without.

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

I can change the story. I am the story.

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

I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.