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Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 2

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I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies – unconscious strategies – to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate,

I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies – unconscious strategies – to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too – sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life. It takes courage to feel the feeling – and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person.

Jeanette Winterson
Lonely, Drama, Acceptance

I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.

Jeanette Winterson
Love, Future, Mean
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.159, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

Jeanette Winterson
Half, Alive, Term

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.

Jeanette Winterson
Love, Powerful, Thinking

Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.

Jeanette Winterson
Song, Art, Dust

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

Jeanette Winterson
Love Is, Sea, Land
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.44, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Shapes, Want

unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.

Jeanette Winterson
Family, Silence, Unhappy
"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?". Book by Jeanette Winterson, 2011.

The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Mind, World
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “The Powerbook”, p.40, Random House

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

Jeanette Winterson
Home, Literature, Might
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.94, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

Jeanette Winterson
Inspirational, Writing, Listening

I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

Jeanette Winterson
Strong, Love Is, Forever

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. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.

Jeanette Winterson
Love You, Rocks, Long

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.

Jeanette Winterson
Giving, Emotion, Language

Do it from the heart or not at all.

Jeanette Winterson
Inspirational, Life, Heart
"Real shopping" by Jeanette Winterson, www.theguardian.com. December 8, 2007.

Language is a finding place, not a hiding place.

Jeanette Winterson
Language, Hiding, Hiding Place
"Shafts of sunlight" by Jeanette Winterson, www.theguardian.com. November 14, 2008.

I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.

Jeanette Winterson
Ordinary, Shapes, Accepting

I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.

Jeanette Winterson
Want, Conquer, Climbs
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “The Powerbook”, p.174, Random House

In this life, you have to be your own hero.

Jeanette Winterson
Hero, This Life
2000 The. Power Book.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.

Jeanette Winterson
Love, Winning, Years
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.43, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

What kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.

Jeanette Winterson
Morning, Flower, Night

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

Jeanette Winterson
Book, Doors, Magic

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Jeanette Winterson
Lying, People, Library
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.72, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.

Jeanette Winterson
Giving Up, Two, Balance

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?

Jeanette Winterson
Past, Reality, Light
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.9, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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