"book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. it is not a hobby. those who do it must do it. those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
— Jeanette Winterson

"What you risk reveals what you value."
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never loses. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? "
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"As your lover describes you, so you are."
— 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 (Sexing the Cherry)

"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?"
— 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 (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. 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 (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer."
— Jeanette Winterson

"To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown."
— 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 (The Passion)

"What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you."
— 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 (The Passion)

"Why is the measure of love loss?"
— Jeanette Winterson

"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book."
— Jeanette Winterson

"After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, "I fuck therefore I am"."
— Jeanette Winterson (Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd)

"Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation."
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line."
— Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark."
— Jeanette Winterson

"Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone."
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it."
— Jeanette Winterson

"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?"
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue."
— Jeanette Winterson (Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery)

"When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling."
— Jeanette Winterson

"do it from the heart or not at all."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"Trust me, I'm telling you stories."
— Jeanette Winterson

"What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo."
— Jeanette Winterson (Powerbook)

"When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires."
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?"
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"'In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'
Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.
'Feel for yourself.'"
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travellers at least have a chose. Those who set sail know know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are perpared. But for us, who travel to cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparaton. We who are fluent find liffe is a foreign language. Somewhere beween the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere beween fear and sex. Somewere beween God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real."
— Jeanette Winterson (Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles)

"Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don’t give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it..."
— Jeanette Winterson

"Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine."
— Jeanette Winterson (Art & Lies)

"I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light. "
— Jeanette Winterson

"I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted."
— Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes."
— Jeanette Winterson

"Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home."
— Jeanette Winterson (Gut Symmetries)

"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 was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you."
— Jeanette Winterson

"She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave
"
— Jeanette Winterson

"To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her,
or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love"
— Jeanette Winterson (Powerbook)

"A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it? "
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love. "
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"Yes, we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check their diary when we arrange to meet."
— Jeanette Winterson

"There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice."
— Jeanette Winterson (Lighthousekeeping)

"Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)