Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.

Death will be like that. We will be forever recognizing people we have never met.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.

I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.

I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?

What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves. If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.

Passion out of passion's obstacles.

I was hungry, but I was nervous too. You were so new and I didn't want to frighten you away. I didn't want to frighten myself away.

I would never pull down a church! I adore churches. It is what happens inside them that I detest.

My experience has been that times always ends. In theory, you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the religious and romantics are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch.

Come again?' She asked. Yes tomorrow, under the sodium street lights, under the tick of the clock. Under my obligations, my history, my fears, this now. This fizzy, giddy all consuming now. I will not let time lie to me. I will not listen to dead voices or unborn pain. What if? Has no power against 'what if not?' The not of you is unbearable. I must have you....

There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming.

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run?

I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.

Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively.

Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.

calling things by their right names is more than giving them an identity bracelet or a label, or a serial number. We summon a vision. Naming is power.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something is missing.

She looked at me. There was a second the kind that holds the whole world ...

I was in danger of drowning, and nobody lost at sea worries about whether the spar they cling to is made of elm or oak.