Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. ... So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself.

I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.

i realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy -speed of light power- to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr.right will make the world new.

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.

Don't mix your heart with your liver.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

I am civilised. My feelings are not.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about being happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is when I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?

There are voices and they must be heard.

I wrote my way out.

There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.

Everyone assumed it had to be some sort of biography, because if you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you're a man, you're actually doing some post-modern play on the novel, some critique on identity with lots of references to Foucault.

I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.

That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.

Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.' 'And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.

Six books… my mother didn't want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

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

That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night.

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence.

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me. Jordan... I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.

I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I.