Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘This world is full of sin.’ We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘You can change the world.’

It’s odd, the things other people think are exciting.

‘There’s this world,’ she banged the wall graphically, ‘and there’s this world,’ she thumped her chest. ‘If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.’

most likely, she’d do what most people do when confronted with something they don’t understand: Panic.

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

what you think is the heart might well be another organ.’

that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.

We are all historians in our small way.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.

But happiness is not a potato.

Wrong

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

‘I love you almost as much as I love the Lord,’ I laughed.

Can love really belong to the demon?

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some

There’s a chance that I’m not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn’t make, for a moment brush against each other.

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

Time is a great deadener; people forget, get bored, grow old, go away.