Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

She said they dealt in unnatural passions. I thought she meant they put chemicals in their sweets.

Such warm tender flesh. Her flesh now, sprung from her head. Her vision.

Then I remembered the gypsy. ‘You’ll never marry.’ That might not be such a bad thing after all.

‘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.’

Whenever we read about a bastard, or someone with crushed testicles, my mother turned over the page and said, ‘Leave that to the Lord,’

There was a woman in our street who told us all she had married a pig. I asked her why she did it, and she said ‘You never know until it’s too late.’ Exactly. No doubt that woman had discovered in life what I had discovered in my dreams. She had unwittingly married a pig.

What do you do if you marry a beast?

‘Don’t worry love,’ she soothed, ‘you’ll get used to it. When I married, I laughed for a week, cried for a month, and settled down for life.

I had to cut through the churchyard to get there, and sometimes I’d steal her a bunch of flowers from the new graves.

We read the Bible as usual, and then told each other how glad we were that the Lord had brought us together. She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged and it felt like drowning.

‘Do you think this is Unnatural Passion?’ I asked her once. ‘Doesn’t feel like it. According to Pastor Finch, that’s awful.’

Getting old, dying, starting again. Not noticing. Father and Son. Father and Son. It has always been this way, nothing can intrude. Father Son and Holy Ghost.

The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

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.

We were quiet, and I traced the outline of her marvellous bones and the triangle of muscle in her stomach. What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

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

‘Melanie is a gift from the Lord, and it would be ungrateful not to appreciate her.’

He turned to me. ‘I love her.’ ‘Then you do not love the Lord.’ ‘Yes, I love both of them.’ ‘You cannot.’

If I had a demon my weak point was Melanie, but she was beautiful and good and had loved me.

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.

It was a bowl of oranges. I took out the largest and tried to peel it. The skin hung stubborn, and soon I lay panting, angry and defeated. What about grapes or bananas? I did finally pull away the outer shell and, cupping both hands round, tore open the fruit.

‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ I murmured, not intending to stop. ‘Oh yes,’ she cried, ‘yes.’

It all seemed to hinge around the fact that I loved the wrong sort of people. Right sort of people in every respect except this one; romantic love for another woman was a sin.

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless.

I loved God and I loved the church, but I began to see that as more and more complicated.

I was supposed to spend the rest of the day in prayer, Melanie presumably gone. I spent it in bed with Katy.

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

‘Will you repent?’ ‘No.’ And I stared at him till he looked away.

my mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.

There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to the pull, it’s hard to pull away.

Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what’s left.

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.

The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.

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.

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown?

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer.

I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few hum...

I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names.

I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed.

‘After all,’ said my mother philosophically, ‘oranges are not the only fruit.’

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss.

Perhaps it was the snow, or the food, or the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. I seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.