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.

There's no story that's the start of itself.

Love is an intervention. Why do we not choose it?" (205)

When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey . . .

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.

All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything--the miracle--is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

I love her. Then you do not love the Lord. Yes, I love both of them. You cannot. I do.

If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can't work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter. Let me in. You do.

what he told himself on those sea-soaked nights...Others joined in and it was discovered that every light had a story-no, every light was a story. And the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

It seems obvious, doesn't it, that someone who is ignored and overlooked will expand to the point where they have to be noticed, even if the noticing is fear and disgust.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

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.

What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

There's so little wonder left in the world because we've seen everything one way or another'.

I don't know how to answer. I know what to think, but words in the head are like voices under water. They are distorted.

I think we are worlds compressed into human form.

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.

The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.

And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?

The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.