One Aladdin Two Lamps Quotes

“Fictions are not make-believe. We have come to understand this better through the medium of sci-fi, as so much of what begins as a futuristic fantasy becomes an ordinary part of the world we know.

Fiction is much more than social-realist cut-outs of contemporary life. More than representation. Fiction declares and debates inner realities that gradually press forward into our outer circumstances. We catch up with our dreams.”
― Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps

“The monstrous inequalities created by the machine-age have widened and deepened with the digital revolution. These are not inevitable or necessary inequalities; these are ideological inequalities. We don't have to order society like this. We choose to. That is, a few powerful people choose the story.”
― Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps

“Even precious materials become worthless when all anyone wants is a slice of bread.”
― Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps

“I know that if an architect of unrest were to design a world guaranteed to destroy the mental, spiritual, emotional, imaginative and creative life of human beings, everywhere, that world would be this one.”
― Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps

“Humans feel bewilderment and disbelief that we are confined to our bodies. Bodies that age and die. Religion might have been invented to convince us that this depressing fact of life is a fiction. The body can’t contain us. Religion regards our physical form as approximate and temporary – and so does magic.”
― Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps

“As a woman who is from a working-class background, I was aware, growing up, how little was expected of me in terms of achievement. It was assumed by my teachers that, like other girls, I too might go into teaching, or train as a nurse (not a doctor), or get a job to bide my time till marriage.

Ambition was for others.

It was not for the working class. It was not for working-class women.

This has nothing to do with genetics. Nothing to do with individual attributes or interests. Nothing to do with what’s natural. It is about social circumstances. It is about socially engineered inequality.

The unscientific lie that all women are inferior to men, that most men are inferior to other men, that non-whites are inferior to whites is a tidy but simple-minded way to avoid any kind of social justice. These are not ‘hard truths’. They are lies.”
― Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps