Jeanette Winterson - Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? (2011)

39 Sourced Quotes

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Mrs. Winterson was not a welcoming woman. If anyone knocked at the door she ran down the lobby and shoved the poker through the letter box.

Jeanette Winterson
I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

Jeanette Winterson
Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home — they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside.

Jeanette Winterson
The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.

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
That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Jeanette Winterson
Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

Jeanette Winterson
Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

Jeanette Winterson
To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

Jeanette Winterson