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Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 10

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Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

Jeanette Winterson
Cutting, Light, Poetry

Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?

Jeanette Winterson
Adventure, Thinking, Hands

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!

Jeanette Winterson
Mother, Book, Too Late

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

Jeanette Winterson
Memories, Loss, Way

Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.

Jeanette Winterson
Lying, Home, Views

When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me. He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.

Jeanette Winterson
Husband, Home, Eye
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.58, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

Jeanette Winterson
Healing, Reality, Light

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

Jeanette Winterson
Writing, Discipline, Creative
"Ten rules for writing fiction (part two)" by Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

I remember once walking out hand in hand with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we'd be rich forever. We filled our pockets and our hair. We were rolled in gold. We ran through the field laughing and our legs and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or golden gods. He kissed my feet, the boy I was with, and when he smiled, he had a gold tooth. It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young.

Jeanette Winterson
Summer, Boys, Hair

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

Jeanette Winterson
Class, Community, Want
Jeanette Winterson (2011). “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”, p.17, Random House

Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Names, White
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.15, Random House

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

Jeanette Winterson
Children, Broken, Triumph
Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

Jeanette Winterson
Past, Rights, Dust
Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Lighthousekeeping”, p.142, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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
Sympathy, Mean, Angel
Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.

Jeanette Winterson
Growing Up, Children, Lying

I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Fiction, Stories

Infatuation.First Love.Lust.My passion can be explained away.But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals

Jeanette Winterson
Passion, First Love, Lust
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.123, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

Jeanette Winterson
Home, Heart, Night

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

Jeanette Winterson
Fear, World, Enough

Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past. Of time to come, she says much, but who listens?

Jeanette Winterson
Past, Broken, Secret
Jeanette Winterson (2005). “Weight”, p.46, Penguin Books India

Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith.

Jeanette Winterson
Faith, Heart, Government

To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

Jeanette Winterson
Passion, Heart, Kissing
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.59, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Jeanette Winterson
Way, Taste, Pomegranates

I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all.

Jeanette Winterson
Broken, Matter, Boxes

Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.

Jeanette Winterson
Age, Body, Information
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “The Stone Gods”, p.13, Penguin UK

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