Jeanette Winterson Quotes

249 Sourced Quotes

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

Jeanette Winterson
She said she'd often wondered why she wanted to do some things and not do other things at all. Well, it was obvious with some things, but for others, there was no reason there. She'd spent a long time puzzling it out, then she thought that what you'd done in a past life you didn't need to do again, and what you had to do in the future, you wouldn't be ready to do now.

Jeanette Winterson
Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.

Jeanette Winterson
She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

Jeanette Winterson
I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder. They all want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That's not the kind of heroism they enjoy.

Jeanette Winterson
He doesn't understand I want the freedom to make my own mistakes.

Jeanette Winterson
I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

Jeanette Winterson
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

Jeanette Winterson
When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not.

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

Jeanette Winterson
What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

Jeanette Winterson
The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?

Jeanette Winterson
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

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
Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone.... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?

Jeanette Winterson
I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

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

Jeanette Winterson
What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

Jeanette Winterson
Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation.

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
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
To change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.

Jeanette Winterson
Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

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
People had changed — or rather fridges had changed them. Mrs. Munde felt that being able to store food for longer periods had broken down the community spirit. There was no need to share now, no need to meet every day, gathering your veg or killing a few rabbits.

Jeanette Winterson