Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

When you are a solitary kid you find an imaginary friend.

Manchester is in the south of the north of England. Its spirit has a contrariness in it -- a south and north bound up together -- at once untamed and unmetropolitan; at the same time, connected and wordly.

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it. Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

Why do humans need answers? Partly I suppose because without one, almost any one, the question itself soon sounds silly.

I'm not afraid of what I am. I'm afraid I will see what I am not.

I guess I'm afraid of not being like other people. No, that's not true. I'm not afraid of not being like other people. I'm afraid I won't find anybody who doesn't mind me not being like other people. I'm not ambitious for money or power. I want to find some real way to live.

Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

A treasure had fallen into our hands and the treasure was each other.

Reading is where the wild things are.

I am always wondering about love.

Why doesn't she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can't get warm... She won't be cold. She has the sun inside her.

The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost.

I can change the story. I am the story.

moss that is concentrating on being green.

I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive... I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

The journey is about coming home....There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail. (p. 220,222)

It's better if I think of my life like that – part miracle, part madness. It's better if I accept that I can't control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide.

Being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love.

We gamble with the thought of winning. But it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

If there is another life he will find her there.

When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry.

All of one's life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.