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Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 7

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What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.

Jeanette Winterson
Stars, Light, Long
Jeanette Winterson (2010). “Weight”, p.3, Canongate Books

Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own.

Jeanette Winterson
Running, Light, Views

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

Jeanette Winterson
Ifs, I Can

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Jeanette Winterson
Writing, Goes On
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.159, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Beloved, Hopeless

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.

Jeanette Winterson
Home, Phones, Light
Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

Jeanette Winterson
Past, Moments, Boundaries
"Gut Symmetries". Book by Jeanette Winterson, 1997.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

Jeanette Winterson
Emotional, Thinking, Doors

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?

Jeanette Winterson
Love You, Long, Said

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

Jeanette Winterson
Inspirational, Children, Kids

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

Jeanette Winterson
Stories, Trust Me, I Can

When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as a result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tight-rope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change.

Jeanette Winterson
Emotional, Decision, Teeth

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

Jeanette Winterson
Thinking, Literature, Private Life
"Redemption songs". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.

Jeanette Winterson
Names, World, Arms
Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Lighthousekeeping”, p.189, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

Jeanette Winterson
Feels

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Jeanette Winterson
Mother, Art, Thinking

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

Jeanette Winterson
Husband, Artist, Helpful
"Redemption songs" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

Jeanette Winterson
Pain, Heart, Reality
Jeanette Winterson (1985). “Oranges are Not the Only Fruit”

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

Jeanette Winterson
Fate, Opposites, Choices
Jeanette Winterson (2010). “Weight”, p.97, Canongate Books

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil. Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

Jeanette Winterson
Reality, Psychosis, Trying

In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.

Jeanette Winterson
Quests, Presence Of Love
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.81, Random House

Two hundred miles from the surface of the earth there is no gravity. The laws of motion are suspended. You could turn somersaults slowly slowly, weight into weightlessness, nowhere to fall. As you lay on your back paddling in space you might notice your feet had fled your head. You are stretching slowly slowly, getting longer, your joints are slipping away from their usual places. There is no connection between your shoulder and your arm. You will break up bone by bone, fractured from who you are, drifting away now, the centre cannot hold.

Jeanette Winterson
Fall, Law, Two

What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

Jeanette Winterson
Stars, Expanding Universe, Light

Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.

Jeanette Winterson
Mind, Needs, Hook

When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed - for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

Jeanette Winterson
Lying, Home, Night

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