The World and Other Places Quotes

“In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day.

A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“Come again?' She asked. Yes tomorrow, under the sodium street lights, under the tick of the clock. Under my obligations, my history, my fears, this now. This fizzy, giddy all consuming now. I will not let time lie to me. I will not listen to dead voices or unborn pain. "What if?" Has no power against 'what if not?' The not of you is unbearable. I must have you....”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“It is true that on bright days we are happy. That is true because the sun on the eyelids effects chemical changes in the body. The sun also diminishes the pupils to pinpricks, letting the light in less. When we can hardly see we are most likely to fall in love.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I like to see the people arriving. I like to imagine their lives. It keeps me from thinking too much about my own. A man shouldn't be too introspective. It weakens him. That is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I'm a Hemingway man myself although I don't believe it is right to hunt lions.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“When I hold you in this night-soaked bed it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. It couldn’t be simpler. It couldn’t be harder. In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I'm not afraid of what I am. I'm afraid I will see what I am not.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“All of one’s life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“Why doesn't she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can't get warm... She won't be cold. She has the sun inside her.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“There is talk in the village that there is more in these sewers than sewerage. Yes, I say, Yes. But not only these sewers. There is more in your heart than can be spoken. More in your eyes than you will tell. More in the mind of you than anyone can know. More in the night than darkness. More in the river than can be dredged. What more ? The hate, envy, malice, greed, stupidity and evil that lie under the floor of everything.

If I have secrets so do you.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I had thought about everything carefully before I had agreed to him. I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated; his heart and mine.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“The important things. Where should I find them? In the detail, like God? In the risk, like the Devil?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“Perhaps it is true that the world is made new again every day but our minds are not. The clamp that holds me will not let me go.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“In the lives of saints I look for confirmation of excess. To them it is not strange to spend nights on a mountain or to forgo food. For them, the visionary and the everyday coincide. Above all, they have no domestic virtues, preferring intensity to comfort. Despite their inhospitable ways, they ferment with unexpected life, like those bleak railway cuttings that host horizontal dandelions. They know there is no passion without pain.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I'm not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. Trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I'm telling you because I know.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“In what way am I any better? She is smug. I am cynical. She is puffed-up. I am punctured. I watch her gamely finding the energy to thrash about on life's greasy surface, while I lie paralysed, croaking about another life I think I can see.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“Why doesn't every mother believer her child can change the world? The child can. This is the joke. Here we are still looking for a saviour and hundreds are being born every second. Look at it, this tiny capsule of new life, indifferent to your prejudices, your miseries, unmindful of the world already made. Make it again? They could if we let them, but we make sure they grow up just like us, fearful like us. Don't let them know the potential that they are.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“The planets are bodies in the solar system and so are we. You and I in elliptical orbs circling life. It is life we want, but we daren't come too close for fear it might burn us away, this life in its intensity.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories