Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

Why is the measure of love loss?

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.

what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?

I know these are ways of surviving, but maybe a refusal, any refusal, to be broken lets in enough light and air to keep believing in the world – the dream of escape.

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.

Happy times are great, but happy times pass – they have to – because time passes.

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.

Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

A tough 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.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places.

She did not need to be trapped in mass.

:(

A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with our religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives – money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.

Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off.

You just washed out the pads along with your stockings at night.

Lol

I fell in love – what else is there to do?

My mother returned, in what seemed to be a hailstorm, though maybe that was her personal weather.

Achieve it or not, I had to try.

I voted for her.

Oh yikes

the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results.

I did not realise the consequences of privatising society.

But how?

Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments.

there is an argument that the haunted house is the house whose vapours are not spectral but chemical.

Oh interesting

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.

She doesn’t judge herself and she doesn’t judge others. Life is as it is.

We’re not here to be regarded ‘only as useful objects’.

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

Birthing is a wound all of its own. The monthly bleeding used to have a magical significance. The baby’s rupture into the world tears the mother’s body and leaves the child’s tiny skull still soft and open. The child is a healing and a cut. The place of lost and found.

Happy endings are only a pause.

There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.