Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

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

‘The work of the Devil, if ever I saw it,’ said my mother, who always believed these things are sent to try us.

Tired of being bullied, I became adept at inventing the most fundamental tortures under the guise of sweet sainthood.

So she never had enough money and after a while she managed to forget that she’d ever had any at all.

It was clear and warm and made me happy. At school there was only confusion.

Better to hear about Hell now than burn in it later.

My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment.

‘Heathen child, the Lord himself was scorned, don’t expect the unwashed to appreciate.’ (Elsie always called the unconverted the unwashed.)

but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin. But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly so as not to get caught.

As I walked up the aisle the crown got heavier and heavier and the dress more and more difficult to walk in. I thought everyone would point at me, but no one noticed.

‘Sweet hearts for a sweet heart,’ he said and laughed. That day I had almost strangled my dog with rage, and been dragged from the house by a desperate mother. Sweet I was not. But I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet,

‘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. It’s different, that’s all, they have their little ways.’

‘You hurt me,’ I accused. ‘No I didn’t,’ he grinned. ‘It was just a bit of love.’

‘There’s time enough for you to get a boy.’ ‘I don’t think I want one.’ ‘There’s what we want,’ she said, putting down a jack, ‘and there’s what we get, remember that.’

‘There’s a boy at church I think you’re keen on.’ ‘What?’ I said, completely mystified.

I’d steal her a bunch of flowers from the new graves. She was always pleased, but then, I never told her where they came from.

Time is a great deadener.

It’s much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. 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.

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.

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

No, he wouldn’t kill me, soft-voiced men do not kill, they are clever. Their kind of violence leaves no visible mark.

There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back.

accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

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.

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.

Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. 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. That is why they are unfit for romantic love.

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.

But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. A cat’s cradle.