Jeanette Winterson Quotes

249 Sourced Quotes

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

Jeanette Winterson
Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.

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
I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Jeanette Winterson
She didn't know that on the wild nights no one can call you home except the one who knows your name.

Jeanette Winterson
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
For myself, I would rather live with sins of excess than sins of denial.

Jeanette Winterson
I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.

Jeanette Winterson
They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. 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
I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

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

Jeanette Winterson
But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

Jeanette Winterson
To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run.

Jeanette Winterson
Why do human beings need answers? Partly I suppose because without one, almost any one, the question itself soon sounds silly.

Jeanette Winterson
What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

Jeanette Winterson
I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?

Jeanette Winterson
We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.

Jeanette Winterson
The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.

Jeanette Winterson
You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved.

Jeanette Winterson
We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.

Jeanette Winterson
The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.

Jeanette Winterson
Bask in it. In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion.

Jeanette Winterson
To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for a moment is to be free.

Jeanette Winterson
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
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
There's so little wonder left in the world because we've seen everything one way or another'.

Jeanette Winterson
Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.

Jeanette Winterson
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?

Jeanette Winterson
Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.

Jeanette Winterson
We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void... For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night?

Jeanette Winterson