Jeanette Winterson Quotes

249 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Jeanette Winterson
I felt as if I had blundered into someone else's life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.

Jeanette Winterson
Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

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

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
Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There's no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.

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

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
If God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.

Jeanette Winterson
When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey...

Jeanette Winterson
Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

Jeanette Winterson
The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was.

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

Jeanette Winterson
True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction—don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

Jeanette Winterson
No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

Jeanette Winterson
I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

Jeanette Winterson
It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.

Jeanette Winterson
He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love. But they might not be telling the truth. Never mind that. You tell them the truth. What do you mean? You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own. So what should I say? When? When I love someone? You should say it.

Jeanette Winterson
Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

Jeanette Winterson
Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

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
I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. the world just pours it out.

Jeanette Winterson
When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.

Jeanette Winterson
The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

Jeanette Winterson