Art and Lies Quotes

“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

“Know thyself,’ said Socrates.
Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

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

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

“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“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

“Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“The fatal combination of indulgence without feeling disgusts me. Strange to be both greedy and dead. For myself, I prefer to hold my desires just out of reach of appetite, to keep myself honed and sharp. I want the keen edge of longing. it is so easy to be a brute and yet it has become rather fashionable. Is that the consequence of leaving your body to science? Of assuming that another pill, another drug, another car, another pocket-sized home-movie station, a DNA transfer, or the complete freedom of choice that five hundred TV channels must bring, will make everything all right? Will soothe the nagging pain in the heart that the latest laser scan refuses to diagnose? The doctor's surgery is full of men and women who do not know why they are unhappy. "Take this", says the Doctor, "you'll soon feel better." They do not feel better, because, little by little, they cease to feel at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I have come so far so fast that I haven't had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I need the dark places to get outside of common sense”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“And I notice too often that the most unfeeling of people relieve their shuttered hearts by cooing over babies, who when grown , will be the same people exploited or ignored.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“What's left? Romance. Love's counterfeit free of charge to all. Fall into my arms and the world with its sorrows will shrink up into a tinsel ball. This is the favorite antidote to the cold robot life of faraway perils and nearby apathy. Apathy. From the Greek A Pathos. Want of feeling. But, don't we know, only find the right boy, only find the right girl, and the feeling will be yours. My colleagues tell me I need just such a remedy. Buried up to my neck in pink foam nothing can hurt me now. Safe to feel. All I can feel is you darling.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“It's so crude' complained her mother, who believed in Good Taste the way Sunday worshipers believed in the Immaculate Conception. She wasn't quite sure what it was but she was sure it was important.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am a wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies