Jeanette Winterson Quotes

249 Sourced Quotes

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

Jeanette Winterson
She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.

Jeanette Winterson
There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

Jeanette Winterson
I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It's rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don't stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end.

Jeanette Winterson
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
If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.

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
Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

Jeanette Winterson
There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

Jeanette Winterson
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.

Jeanette Winterson
As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.

Jeanette Winterson
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.

Jeanette Winterson
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.

Jeanette Winterson
We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.

Jeanette Winterson
I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

Jeanette Winterson
There is no such thing as autobiography. There's only art and lies.

Jeanette Winterson
Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.

Jeanette Winterson
I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

Jeanette Winterson
To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

Jeanette Winterson
I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The Sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.

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
You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.

Jeanette Winterson
Six books… my mother didn't want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Jeanette Winterson
I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag.

Jeanette Winterson
Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

Jeanette Winterson
I've never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.

Jeanette Winterson
I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.

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