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Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 3

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In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.

Jeanette Winterson
Hands, Pulse, World
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.51, Random House

After every ''victory'' you have more enemies.

Jeanette Winterson
Peace, War, Enemy

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

Jeanette Winterson
Change, Crush, Book
"Redemption songs" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

Happy ending are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.

Jeanette Winterson
Revenge, Past, Tragedy

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Jeanette Winterson
Lying, Want, Language
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.100, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

Jeanette Winterson
Art, Real, Rebellion

How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

Jeanette Winterson
Past, Forget, Easy

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.

Jeanette Winterson
Drawing, Space, Desire
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.77, Random House

If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Water, Should
Jeanette Winterson (2011). “The Passion”, p.76, Random House

I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.

Jeanette Winterson
Regret, Excess, Denial

I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.

Jeanette Winterson
Accused, Understood, Knows

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

Jeanette Winterson
Numbness, Waiting, Leaving

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

Jeanette Winterson
Believe, Cat, People
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.93, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.

Jeanette Winterson
Cheating, Hands, Infidelity

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

Jeanette Winterson
Love You, Fire, Risk

Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.

Jeanette Winterson
Dog, Dragons, Knives
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.123, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It's not really random at all.

Jeanette Winterson
Creativity, Order, Patterns
Source: www.raintaxi.com

As your lover describes you, so you are.

Jeanette Winterson
Lovers, Self Fulfilling Prophecy
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Sexing the Cherry”, p.57, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.

Jeanette Winterson
Suicide, Survival, Records

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

Jeanette Winterson
Years, One Day, World

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

Jeanette Winterson
Moving, Past, Serial Killer

If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.

Jeanette Winterson
Art, Use, Denial
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery”, p.14, Random House

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

Jeanette Winterson
Mirrors, Saws, Firsts
Jeanette Winterson (2011). “The Passion”, p.154, Random House

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

Jeanette Winterson
Art, Luxury, People
"Redemption songs". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

Jeanette Winterson
Depression, Art, Healing

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