Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

How long before the shouting starts? How long before the tears and the accusations and the pain? That specific stone n the stomach pain when you lose something you haven't got round to valuing? Why is the measure of love loss?

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at until you understood them, they couldn't change halfway through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water - either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in your rock - your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and them without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams.

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

He scarred her arm...but she did not care because she loved him and she knew that love leaves a wound that leaves a scar.

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse — there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next. Love is an intervention.

Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?

Naming is a difficult and timeconsuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

Their throats were bare for God.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.

In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.

Somewhere beween the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere beween fear and sex. Somewere beween God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse.

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.

Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

But, Mistress, do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.