Jeanette Winterson Quotes

249 Sourced Quotes

No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value.

Jeanette Winterson
Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play.

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

Jeanette Winterson
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
You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

Jeanette Winterson
I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses

Jeanette Winterson
Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

Jeanette Winterson
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

Jeanette Winterson
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.

Jeanette Winterson
She thought of an article she had once seen on mind control. Apparently if there was a person fiendish enough to set about interfering with your life, the only thing you could do was to concentrate hard on someone they were unlikely ever to have heard of called Martin Amis. The particular blankness of this image was guaranteed to protect from any subtle force, but Gloria realised with a sinking heart that it was too late now.

Jeanette Winterson
Whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

Jeanette Winterson
Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you as changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

Jeanette Winterson
Mrs. Winterson was not a welcoming woman. If anyone knocked at the door she ran down the lobby and shoved the poker through the letter box.

Jeanette Winterson
There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit.

Jeanette Winterson
It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do.

Jeanette Winterson
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain.

Jeanette Winterson
I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

Jeanette Winterson
Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Jeanette Winterson
Know thyself,' said Socrates. Know thyself,' said Sappho, 'and make sure that the Church never finds out.

Jeanette Winterson
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
Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

Jeanette Winterson
This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

Jeanette Winterson
Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision.

Jeanette Winterson
No one working in the English language now comes close to my exuberance, my passion, my fidelity to words.

Jeanette Winterson
Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a café, years ago.

Jeanette Winterson