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Jeanette Winterson Quotes about Heart

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

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

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

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.

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 feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?

Jeanette Winterson
Strong, Heart, Blue

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?

Jeanette Winterson
Home, Heart, Two

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Islands, Matter

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

Jeanette Winterson
Cat, Heart, Dry Up
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.66, 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

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”

When my friend Melot set the trap, I think I knew it. I turned to death full face, as I had turned to love with my whole body. I would let death enter me as you had entered me. You had crept along my blood vessels through the wound, and the blood that circulates returns to the heart. You circulated me, you made me blush like a girl in the hoop of your hands. You were in my arteries and my lymph, you were the colour just under my skin, and if I cut myself, it was you I bled. Red Isolde, alive on my fingers, and always the force of blood pushing you back to my heart.

Jeanette Winterson
Girl, Heart, Cutting

Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Names, White
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.15, Random House

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

Jeanette Winterson
Home, Heart, Night

Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith.

Jeanette Winterson
Faith, Heart, Government

To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

Jeanette Winterson
Passion, Heart, Kissing
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.59, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Thinking, Feelings

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Finals, May
Jeanette Winterson (2011). “The Passion”, p.145, Random House

St Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry. She wanted to be a nun. She hoped I would be a priest and saved to give me an education while my friends plaited rope and trailed after the plough. I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.

Jeanette Winterson
Mother, Passion, Heart
Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.9, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Perfect, Holy Grail

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Giving, Asking

Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.

Jeanette Winterson
Heart, Two, Splits
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “The Powerbook”, p.185, Random House

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

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

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.

your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught.

Jeanette Winterson
Strong, Heart, Play

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