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Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 16

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Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

Jeanette Winterson
Wine, Trying, Bottles
Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Jeanette Winterson
Thinking, Tragic, Situation
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.161, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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.

Jeanette Winterson
Love Is, Paradise, Cruelty
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.33, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

Jeanette Winterson
Wall, Fall, Trumpets
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.112, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder. Theyall want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That's not the kind of heroism they enjoy.

Jeanette Winterson
Hate, Hero, Kids
1989 Sexing the Cherry.

In therapy , the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

Jeanette Winterson
Scary, Waste, Therapists
Jeanette Winterson (2011). “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”, p.35, Random House

Very often history is a means of denying the past.

Jeanette Winterson
Mean, Past, History
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.93, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg -- it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.

Jeanette Winterson
Fall, Heart, Fighting

It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose.

Jeanette Winterson
Routine, Looks, Purpose

It was actually books that started to make those pockets of freedom, which I hadn't otherwise experienced. I do see them as talismans, as sacred objects. I see them as something that will protect me, I suppose, that will save me from things that I feel are threatening. I still think that; it doesn't change. It doesn't change, having money, being successful. So from the very first, if I was hurt in some way, then I would take a book -- which was very difficult for me to buy when I was little -- and I would go up into the hills, and that is how I would assuage my hurt.

Jeanette Winterson
Hurt, Book, Successful

Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Mean, Gossip

Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.

Jeanette Winterson
Wall, Real, Light
Jeanette Winterson (1991). “Sexing the Cherry”, Vintage

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Ice, Truth Is
"The Powerbook". Book by Jeanette Winterson, 2000.

The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.

Jeanette Winterson
Spirituality, Impossible, Worship

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

Jeanette Winterson
Land, Birth, Infant
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “The Stone Gods”, p.115, Penguin UK

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
Book, Laughing, Use

Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.

Jeanette Winterson
Adults
1987 The Passion, ch.1.

Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Soul, Rendezvous

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

Jeanette Winterson
Literature, Causes, Trouble
"Redemption songs". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

Jeanette Winterson
Revenge, Return, Reckoning

Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?

Jeanette Winterson
Death, Children, Yesterday

I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It's rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don't stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end.

Jeanette Winterson
Writing, Cutting, Thinking

The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?

Jeanette Winterson
Thinking, Rivers, People
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Sexing The Cherry”, p.123, Random House

the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

Jeanette Winterson
Book, Goes On, Bounds
Jeanette Winterson (2011). “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”, p.27, Random House

A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros.

Jeanette Winterson
Homosexual, Rhinoceros
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.128, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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