Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.

I love badly. That is too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window.

She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings.

I've turned myself inside out to try and avoid what happened today. You affect me in ways I can't quantify or contain. All I can measure is the effect, and the effect is that I am out of control.

We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.

Life was a pre-death experience.

I love you. You've loved other people but you still left them. It's not that simple. I don't want to be another scalp on your pole.

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.

Slightest accidents open up new worlds.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.

I looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself. I was up to my chin when the shout came, and I will never forget it. Never. For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering — when I can no longer speak, hear me.

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.