Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here.

I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.

There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit.

I never cared about money.

Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!

..to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.

It is the nature of walls that they should fall.

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.

I've never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves.

Their throats were bare for God.

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.

Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.