Brian > Brian's Quotes

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“What you risk reveals what you value.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave”
― Jeanette Winterson

“What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love... or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not known it, habit being a great binder. I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing.
... I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams... To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you.
The truth is, you never understood yourself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“do it from the heart or not at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, "I fuck therefore I am".”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd

“You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.

Lies 2: Time is a straight line.

Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.

Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.

Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...)

Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.

Lies 7: Reality is truth.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.
We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. ”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? ”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. 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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“In this life you have to be your own hero.

By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.

Like it or not, you are alone in a forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who’s usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as a straw, and away he goes (don’t worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he’ll find the treasure.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

“The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Slightest accidents open up new worlds.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

“He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.”
― jeanette winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit