Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Know thyself,' said Socrates. Know thyself,' said Sappho, 'and make sure that the Church never finds out.

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

I didn't want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it's rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.

It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.

You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays

Don't you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn't the mirror hostile enough?

I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of seperate worlds meeting is very small. The lure is immense. We send starships. We fall in love

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

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.

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.