Jeanette Winterson Quotes

249 Sourced Quotes

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
What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

Jeanette Winterson
If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. It's all in the mind.

Jeanette Winterson
If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.

Jeanette Winterson
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.

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

Jeanette Winterson
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
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
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
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
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
The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

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

Jeanette Winterson