Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

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.

We always think the thing we need to transform everything – the miracle – is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

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.

whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

The Odyssey, Beowulf are poems, yes, but with a practical function. If you can’t write it down how will you pass it on? You remember. You recite.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

I had been damaged and a very important part of me had been destroyed – that was my reality, the facts of my life; but on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel, and as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

Time is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised.

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.

World enough, and time: I was young, so I had time, but I knew I had to find world – I didn’t even have a room of my own.

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture – exploit the new thing then move on.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound.

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.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus, for all his adventures and far-flung wandering, is always urged to ‘remember the return’. The journey is about coming home. When he reaches Ithaca the place is in uproar with unruly suitors for his hard-pressed wife. Two things happen: his dog scents him, and his wife recognises him by the scar on his thigh. She feels the wound.

There are so many wound stories: Chiron, the centaur, half-man, half-horse, is shot by a poisoned arrow tipped in the Hydra’s blood, and because he is immortal and cannot die, he must live forever in agony. But he uses the pain of the wound to heal others. The wound becomes its own salve.

Prometheus, fire-stealer from the gods, is punished with a daily wound: each morning an eagle perches on his hip and rips out his liver; each night the wound heals, only to be scored open the next day. I think of him, burned dark in the sun where he is chained to the Caucausia...

But Oedipus is an adoption story and a wound story too. Oedipus has his ankles pierced together by his mother Jocasta before she abandons him, so that he cannot crawl away. He is rescued, and returns to kill his father and marry his mother, unrecognised by anyone except the blind prophet Tiresias – a case of one wound recognising another. You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail.