Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

I told myself as hero like any shipwreck story. It was a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not altogether human, and rarely kind.

It is impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself.

I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. 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.

She just didn’t like anyone and she just didn’t like life. Life was a burden to be carried as far as the grave and then dumped.

the best of times and the worst of times were here – everything the machine could achieve, and the terrible human cost.

That typical flat grey unlovely look of the northern industrial roofscape is no-nonsense efficient, like the industry the houses were built to support. You get on with it, you work hard, you don’t try for beauty or dreaming. You don’t build for the view. Thick flagstone floors, small mean rooms, dismal backyards.

This is a landscape of few words, taciturn, reluctant. It is not an easy beauty. But it is beautiful.

was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.

I try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream . . .

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.

If the sun is shining, stand in it – yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass – they have to – because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is lifelong, and it is not goal-centred.

My mother was a good reader, confident and dramatic. She read the Bible as though it had just been written – and perhaps it was like that for her. I got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

All she ever wanted was for everyone to go away. And when I did she never forgave me.

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.

Her funeral money was sewn into the curtains – at least it was until I stole it.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear . . . Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

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

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through.

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.

I have always been good at sleeping.

I didn’t fear it after a while. It did not modify my behaviour. It did make me hate them – not all the time – but with the hatred of the helpless; a flaring, subsiding hatred that gradually became the bed of the relationship. A hatred made of coal, and burning low like coal, and fanned up every time there was another crime, another punishment.

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.

I am upset that I didn’t look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can’t grow up. They can get older, but they can’t grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won’t hit love in the face.

Happiness was still on the other side of a glass door, but at least she could see it through the glass, like a prisoner being visited by a longed-for loved one.

I learned secrecy early. To hide my heart. To conceal my thoughts.

I had accepted the bad label. It was better to have some identity than none at all.

We were usually cold but I don’t remember being upset by it. My dad had had no socks when he was a little boy, so our feet, if not the rest of us, had made progress.

She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her.

Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity.

I am not entirely happy about that, but when I did live with someone, and for thirteen years, I could only manage it by having a lot of separate space. I am not messy, I am organised, and I cook and clean very happily, but another presence is hard for me. I wish it were not so, because I would really like to live with someone I love.

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.

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.

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.

It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.

She carried a goose half in, half out of her bag, its slack head hung sideways like a dream nobody could remember.

I was a terrible pupil, inattentive and troublesome, and my reports were year-in year-out awful. I couldn’t concentrate and I didn’t understand much of what was being said to me. I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

We circled each other, wary, abandoned, full of longing. We came close but not close enough and then we pushed each other away forever.

I was all desire, desire for life. And I was lonely.

I was wondering what it would be like to have a home of your own where you could come and go, where people would be welcome, where you would never be frightened again . . .

I was crying then, and kissing her, and we got undressed and into the little caravan bed, and I remembered, my body remembered, what it was like to be in one place and to be able to be there – not watchful, not worried, not with your head somewhere else.

‘I love you. I’ve loved you for ages.’ ‘I was too scared,’ I said. ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’

And her clearness was like water, cool and deep and see-through right to the bottom. No guilt. No fear.

I was living in my own world of books and love. The world was vivid and untouched. I felt free again – I think because I was loved.