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Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 17

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Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get

Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

Jeanette Winterson
Death, Home, Class

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.

Jeanette Winterson
Sex, Love Is, World

Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.

Jeanette Winterson
Love, Pay, Bills

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

Jeanette Winterson
Creativity, Mad, Trying

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Jeanette Winterson
Life, Mistake, Civilization
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “The Stone Gods”, p.78, Penguin UK

It is the nature of walls that they should fall.

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

Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings.

Jeanette Winterson
Wings, Fans, Blades

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art.

Jeanette Winterson
Art, Enemy, Haste

Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?

Jeanette Winterson
Thinking, Mind, Want

Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I'm really a flight animal.

Jeanette Winterson
Fighting, Animal, Flight

The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.

Jeanette Winterson
Mother, Sex, Boys

There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit.

Jeanette Winterson
Men, Use, Matter

It is silence that most needs an answering -- when I can no longer speak, hear me.

Jeanette Winterson
Silence, Needs, Speak

We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void... For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night?

Jeanette Winterson
Night, Bridges, Water
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.57, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Jeanette Winterson
Life, Cynical, One Day

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

Jeanette Winterson
Country, Past, Needs

Love is an experiment ... what happens next is always surprising.

Jeanette Winterson
Love, Next, Surprising

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?

Jeanette Winterson
Strangers And Friends, Want

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

Jeanette Winterson
Memories, Looks, World
Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Lighthousekeeping”, p.176, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

Jeanette Winterson
Beautiful, Knives, Knowing

Explore me' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.

Jeanette Winterson
Wall, Home, Thinking
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.120, Random House

He: What’s the matter with you? Me: Nothing. Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.

Jeanette Winterson
Forever, Soul, Matter

Where did love begin?What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary,dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you? In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts.

Jeanette Winterson
Flower, Love You, Home
Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Lighthousekeeping”, p.179, HMH

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

Jeanette Winterson
Fate, May, Moments
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.7, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.

Jeanette Winterson
Fear
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.23, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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