Jeanette Winterson Quotes

249 Sourced Quotes

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
One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but thats quite hard to say casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, and then being on somebody else's.

Jeanette Winterson
Infatuation.First Love.Lust.My passion can be explained away.But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals

Jeanette Winterson
When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me. He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.

Jeanette Winterson
The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.

Jeanette Winterson
In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.
Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.
Feeling is frightening.

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
The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.

Jeanette Winterson
Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

Jeanette Winterson
The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

Jeanette Winterson
History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Jeanette Winterson
One of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal. The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the national identity, all the things that a particular kind of man with a particular kind of power urge adores, these are the things that become important. War gives the lie to the personal, drowns it in meetings, alarms, sacrifices. The personal is only allowed to return as death.

Jeanette Winterson
When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household.

Jeanette Winterson
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
I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.

Jeanette Winterson
In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

Jeanette Winterson
What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous.

Jeanette Winterson
Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.

Jeanette Winterson
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Jeanette Winterson
Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Jeanette Winterson
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
Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.

Jeanette Winterson
Today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected.

Jeanette Winterson
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Jeanette Winterson
Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

Jeanette Winterson
It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

Jeanette Winterson
Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing.

Jeanette Winterson
I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all.

Jeanette Winterson
Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.

Jeanette Winterson
Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

Jeanette Winterson