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Jeanette Winterson -
Love
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In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.
Jeanette Winterson
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Infatuation.First Love.Lust.My passion can be explained away.But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals
Jeanette Winterson
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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
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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
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To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for a moment is to be free.
Jeanette Winterson
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
Jeanette Winterson
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If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.
Jeanette Winterson
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I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.
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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?
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Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.
Jeanette Winterson
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When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.
Jeanette Winterson
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It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.
Jeanette Winterson
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I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.
Jeanette Winterson
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My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.
Jeanette Winterson
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There were those who claimed that love, if it be allowed at all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house.
Jeanette Winterson
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What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
Jeanette Winterson
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Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.
Jeanette Winterson
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I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of seperate worlds meeting is very small. The lure is immense. We send starships. We fall in love
Jeanette Winterson
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We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.
Jeanette Winterson
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Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
Jeanette Winterson
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I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses
Jeanette Winterson
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Memoir is like a patchwork quilt — a log cabin pioneer way of piecing together experience. It satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.
Jeanette Winterson
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We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.
Jeanette Winterson
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It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do.
Jeanette Winterson
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Quote of the day
Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle.
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
Jeanette Winterson
Creative Commons
Born:
August 27, 1959
(age 65)
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