Love Quotes

“Heterosexual choice is allowed to be the background of a writer’s life; its wallpaper. So is maleness. And whiteness. Step out of that and you will be called a feminist writer, a lesbian writer, a gay writer, a woman writer. A black writer. You will never be called a heterosexual writer or a male writer or a white writer. Those signifiers are absorbed into the single word ‘writer’.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love

“So light a candle to the dead. And light a candle to miracles, however unlikely, and pray that you recognise yours. And light a candle to the living; the world of friendship and family that means so much. And light a candle to the future; that it may happen and not be swallowed up by darkness. And light a candle to love.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love: Vintage Minis

“Truth is a questioning place.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love

“None of us lives without loss. Or regret. But none of us need live without imagination. We can learn to see past ourselves.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love

“Fictional characters are the original avatars for writer and reader alike. In this place of freedom we can choose who we want to be. And we can find a spectrum of feeling, experience, sexuality, even anger or murder, not available in daily life.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love

“It hasn’t been too fashionable to talk about the soul. We live in a material world. Religion is discredited as superstition or, worse, fundamentalism. Spirituality, even when detached from religion, looks a bit hippy, wooly, vague; a comfort-zone for those who can’t quite manage life as a biological and chemical accident with miraculous consequences.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love

“If there are only four possible endings to any story – comedy, tragedy, revenge and forgiveness –”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love: Vintage Minis

“Stories are full of questions. What if? What is? Who am I? Who are you? What do I believe? Why do I believe it? We ask these questions in other ways – of course we do, politically, philosophically, spiritually. We address them head-on. And that’s the difference, I guess, because, as Freud worked out at the start of the 20th century, human beings cannot always, or even optimally, address the big, the dark, the difficult, the shameful, the guilty, the criminal, the crazy head-on. We have to go sideways, downwards, away from without running away. We use a proxy or an avatar. And that’s what stories let happen.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love: Vintage Minis

“about The Passion and about fiction versus lying, I realise all the obvious things about invention as a way of getting at a deeper truth, and lying as a way of avoiding any truth at all or, worse, creating a nightmare world where nothing is as it seems, where nothing can be depended upon – we know human minds can’t cope with that, and then we instinctively cling to the ‘strong man’, who is usually the biggest liar of the lot.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love: Vintage Minis