Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t setting my story against hers.

Why is the measure of love loss?

In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?

They had bought the house for £200 in 1947.

Oranges – ‘What I want does exist if I dare to find it …’

Sometimes she seemed happy, and played the piano, but unhappiness was always close by, and some other thought would cloud her mind so that she stopped playing, abruptly, and closed the lid, and walked up and down, up and down the back alley under the lines of strung washing, walking, walking as though she had lost something.

Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy – which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.

There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people. It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

she knew of a family whose youngest child had climbed into the fridge to play hide-and-seek, and frozen to death. They had to defrost the fridge to prise him out. After that the council took away the other children. I wondered why they didn’t just take away the fridge.

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.

When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.

‘I never had secrets from my mother … but I am not your mother, am I?’ And after that she never was.

My mother’s eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.

‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’

Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. Read it aloud. And look what Marvell makes happen by putting the line break at ‘sun’. The line break right there forces a nano-pause, and so the sun does indeed stand still – then the line gallops forward.

Woolf called her novel a biography, and Stein wrote somebody else’s autobiography. Both women were collapsing the space between fact and fiction – Orlando used the real-life Vita Sackville-West as its heroine, and Stein used her lover, Alice B. Toklas.

‘Whenever I am troubled,’ said the librarian, ‘I think about the Dewey decimal system.’ ‘Then what happens?’ asked the junior, rather overawed. ‘Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course – as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.’

Jung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises – at that level there is only a winner and a loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above – like seeing a storm from higher ground.

It takes courage to feel the feeling – and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable? I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.

We now assume that people who hear voices do terrible things; murderers and psychopaths hear voices, and so do religious fanatics and suicide bombers. But in the past, voices were respectable – desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wise-woman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing. Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

A few months later we were having our afternoon walk when I said something about how nobody had cuddled us when we were little. I said ‘us’, not ‘you’. She held my hand. She had never done that before; mainly she walked behind shooting her sentences. We both sat down and cried. I said, ‘We will learn how to love.’

… my mother came running down the street after me. Look at her, like an angel, like a light-beam, running alongside the pram. I lifted up my hands to catch her, and the light was there, the outline of her, but like angels and light she vanished. Is that her, at the end of the street, smaller and smaller, like a light-years-away star? I always believed I would see her again.

and I won’t take no for an answer. What is ‘no’? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the ‘yes’.

‘The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.’

it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t.

MY MOTHER HAD to sever some part of herself to let me go. I have felt the wound ever since.

And I don’t know what I feel about her. I panic when my feelings are not clear. It is like staring into a muddy pond, and rather than wait until an ecosystem develops to clear the water, I prefer to drain the pond.