Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

Books read us back to ourselves.

Learning to read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is liberating – it is the difference between energy and mass. Mass is the beloved object – the world we can touch and feel – but mass is also the dead weight in ourselves and others.

‘If you think about something for long enough,’ she explained, ‘more than likely, that thing will happen.’ She tapped her head. ‘It’s all in the mind.’ My mother believed that if you prayed for something long enough it happened. I asked Elsie if that was the same thing. ‘God’s in everything,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘so it’s always the same thing.’ I had a feeling my mother would disagree, but she wasn’t there, so it didn’t matter.

‘All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.’

yellowy picture of a pretty woman holding a cat. ‘Who’s that?’ I pointed. ‘That? Oh just Eddy’s sister, I don’t know why I put it there,’ and she turned the page. Next time we looked, it had gone.

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in an usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).

It meant that 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.

Rossetti who flung his new poems into the grave of his wife, and had to ask permission from the home secretary to get them out again six years later.

The search for perfection, she had told him, was in fact the search for balance, for harmony. And she showed him Libra, the scales, and Pisces, the fish, and last of all put out her two hands. ‘Here is the clue,’ she said. ‘Here in this first and personal balance.’ ‘There are two principles,’ she said, ‘the Weight and the Counter-weight.’ ‘Oh yes,’ put in one of the advisors, ‘you mean the sphere of Destiny and the wheel of Fortune.’

TIME IS A great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity.

People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget.

The dead don’t shout.

‘I love you almost as much as I love the Lord,’ I laughed.

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.