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Jeanette Winterson Quotes about Reading

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In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.

In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, World, Dialogue

reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Writing, Thinking

Yes, we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check their diary when we arrange to meet.

Jeanette Winterson
Friendship, Smart, Reading

Reading is where the wild things are.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Wild Things

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Book, Eye
Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.89, Random House

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Jeanette Winterson
Book, Reading, Doors

I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Fiction, Stories

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

Jeanette Winterson
Baby, Book, Reading
"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?". Book by Jeanette Winterson, www.abc.net.au. 2011.

Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Soul, Rendezvous

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Fiction, Passionate
Jeanette Winterson (2011). “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”, p.117, Random House

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Waiting, Next

The best language is always found in books because it's considered. It's a high language. Sometimes, it is complex and difficult. It's empowering and offers a way to speak about yourself that you don't have if all you are doing is reading the newspaper and watching TV.

Jeanette Winterson
Book, Reading, Empowering
Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's the most exciting place because it's going on for you, and you're in that relationship. In that sense, it's like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It's the two of you. It's your own world.

Jeanette Winterson
Reading, Moving, Book
Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

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