Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.

Perfection, the man said, was a thing to aspire to. It was the condition of the Godhead, it was the condition of the man before the Fall. It could only be truly realized in the next world, but we had a sense of it, a maddening, impossible sense, which was both a blessing and a curse.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Why had no one told me? Did that mean no one else knew? Did that mean that all over the globe, in all innocence, women were marrying beasts?

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

At last she put on her gloves and beret and very lightly kissed me goodbye. I felt nothing. But when she’d gone, I pulled up my knees under my chin, and begged the Lord to set me free.

If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.

It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.

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.

It’s a visitor’s privilege to be foolish.

I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.

I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

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.

Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands ...

I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic lo...

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only kn...

One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship.

But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

Perhaps it was the snow, or the food, or the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. I seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.