Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice.

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.

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.

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

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. Do you come back?

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.

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.

When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable.

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