Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.

Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?

There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that. There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you. Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea. Or the people who found Atlantis.

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

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

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.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.

Breathe in, breath out. Oxygen is carcinogenic and likely puts a limit on our life span. It would be unwise though, to try to extend life by not breathing at all. Which of us doesn't do it? Either we loll in anaerobic stupor, too afraid to fill our lungs with risky beauty, or we roll out fire like dragons, destroying the world we love. I try not to burn up my world with rage. It is so hard.

A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.