Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life.

You were loved then and you are loved now. Isn't that enough?

Cheer up ye saints of God, There's nothing to worry about; Nothing to make you feel afraid, Nothing to make you doubt; Remember Jesus saves you; So why not trust him and shout, You'll be sorry you worried at all, tomorrow, morning.

We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.

My mother's eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.

Sanity is the thread through the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Once cut, or unravelled, all that lies in wait are gloomy tunnels unfathomable by any map, and what hides there is a beast in human form, wearing our own face.

Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.

In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.

She was a bright disc in him that left him sun-spun. She was circular, light-turned, equinox-sprung. She was season and movement, but he had never seen her cold. In winter, her fire sank from the surface to below the surface, and warmed her great halls like the legend of the king who kept the sun in his hearth.

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.

They never say, I love you with all my kidneys. I love you with my liver. They never say, my gall bladder is yours and yours alone. No one says, she broke my appendix.

When I hold you in this night-soaked bed it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. It couldn't be simpler. It couldn't be harder. In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What's the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn't poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.

The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate. I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that -even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hulll shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother. Shoals of babies vied for life. I won.

The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self.

Soldiers and women. That's how the world is. Any other role is temporary. Any other role is a gesture.

I sat at the back, listening to the music or mumbling through the sevice. I'm never tempted by God, but I like his trappings.

to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.

This is a quantum universe,' said Spike, 'neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.

It seems to me that being the right size for your world-- and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions-- is a valuable clue to learning how to live.

Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught by a radio receiver, light years later, like a recorded message nobody heard, back-played now into infinity across time. Love and loss.

I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning.