Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.

Life was a pre-death experience.

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.

This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

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.

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

‘If I can’t stay where I am, and I can’t, then I will put all that I can into the going.’

And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the pieces of my broken mind.

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.