Jeanette Winterson - Time Quotes

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Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

Jeanette Winterson
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.

Jeanette Winterson
There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

Jeanette Winterson
Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you as changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

Jeanette Winterson
The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.'

Jeanette Winterson
When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not.

Jeanette Winterson
Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past. Of time to come, she says much, but who listens?

Jeanette Winterson
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

Jeanette Winterson
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.

Jeanette Winterson
The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

Jeanette Winterson
Live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.

Jeanette Winterson
Whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

Jeanette Winterson
What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

Jeanette Winterson
The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?

Jeanette Winterson