Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?

It is always a mistake to argue with a librarian.

Atlas gazed out, as he always did, into infinite space, wishing he could be part of it, even for one hour.

What is 'no'? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the 'yes'.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.

Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.

There are two questions: where have you come from, and where are you going? But the brain doesn't have separate regions for the past and future; only the present is differentiated by the brain. We split time into three parts. The brain, it seems, splits it twice only: now, and not now.

It takes much longer to leave the psychic place than the physical place. (p.120)

There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness unblocks the future. (p.225)

I am not a fan of supermarkets and I hate shopping there, even for things I can't get elsewhere, like cat food and bin bags. A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn't just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noise that made room for everyone, money or not.

I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.

There is so little life, and it is fraught with chance. We meet, we don't meet, we take the wrong turning, and still bump into each other. We conscientiously choose the 'right road' and it leads nowhere.

The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language.

The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.

The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. ... Wisdom says forget, the body howls.

The night seems more temporary than the day, especially to lovers, and it also seems more uncertain. In this way it sums up our lives, which are uncertain and temporary. We forget about that in the day. In the day we go on for ever.

What we notice in stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. i know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope in the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun.

I don't expect to be happy. I don't imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don't think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving.

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.