Jeanette Winterson Quotes

249 Sourced Quotes

The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.

Jeanette Winterson
Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

Jeanette Winterson
The power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

Jeanette Winterson
There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.

Jeanette Winterson
The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness.

Jeanette Winterson
Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world.

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
I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

Jeanette Winterson
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

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
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
Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

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
Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I'm really a flight animal.

Jeanette Winterson