Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

‘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.’

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

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity.

People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult.

And if we can’t dispose of it we can alter it. The dead don’t shout.

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.

So the past, because it is past, is only malleable where once it was flexible.

Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches . . . .

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.

There are different kinds of treachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.

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.

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