Jeanette Winterson - Sexing the Cherry (1981)

22 Sourced Quotes

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No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value.

Jeanette Winterson
The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

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
The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.

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

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

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

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
The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.

Jeanette Winterson
For myself, I would rather live with sins of excess than sins of denial.

Jeanette Winterson
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.

Jeanette Winterson
That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the worlds tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.

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
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
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Jeanette Winterson
…I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.

Jeanette Winterson
I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves.

Jeanette Winterson