Jeanette Winterson > Quotes

“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

“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

“What you risk reveals what you value.”
― 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 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

“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

“While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

“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

“Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“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

“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

“Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“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

“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

“Why is the measure of love loss?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“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

“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

“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love... or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not known it, habit being a great binder. I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing.
... I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams... To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you.
The truth is, you never understood yourself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“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

“do it from the heart or not at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Do you fall in love often?"

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

“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 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

“There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“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

“I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

“Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

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

“In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“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

“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

“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

“What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Powerbook

“Trust me, I'm telling you stories.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

“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

“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

“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 demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion