Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

Part fact part fiction is what life is.

life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. 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.

There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people.

I felt free again – I think because I was loved.

Whenever she said ‘Shakespeare’, she bowed her head,

‘Whenever I am troubled,’ said the librarian, ‘I think about the Dewey decimal system.’

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, where Troilus, defeated and dead, is taken up to the Seventh Sphere and he looks down on the sublunar world – ours – and laughs because he realises how absurd it all is – the things that mean so much, the feuds we carry, the irreconcilables.

Nightmare nightmare nightmare.

But wounding seems to be a clue or a key to being human. There is value here as well as agony.

I could not smash the ice that separated me from myself, I could only let it melt, and that meant losing all firm foothold, all sense of ground. It meant a chaotic merging with what felt like utter craziness.

There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.