Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

In their world good manners and good sense prevail. They don't imagine that to choose sensibly is to set a time-bomb under yourself. They don't imagine you are ripe for the cutting, waiting for your chance at life. They don't think of the wreckage an exploding life will cause… Settle down, feet under the table. She's a nice girl, he's a nice boy. It's the clichés that cause the trouble.

And I notice too often that the most unfeeling of people relieve their shuttered hearts by cooing over babies, who when grown , will be the same people exploited or ignored.

What they held was already inside me, and together we could get away. And standing over the smoldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. Fuck it, I thought, I can write my own.

If someone liked me, I waited until she was off guard, and then I told her I didn't want to be her friend any more. I watched the confusion and upset. The tears. Then I ran off, triumphantly in control, and very fast the triumph and the control leaked away, and then I cried and cried, because I had put myself on the outside again, on the doorstep again, where I didn't want to be.

You are young, said my father. You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day. You'll get older, said my mother, that's what happens. Then what happens? You won't be able to find the treasure. Will I be too old to look for it? No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.

We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent.

Ne sachant quoi lire ni dans quel ordre, j'ai suivi l'alphabet. Dieu merci, elle s'appelait Austen...

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open -- the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

I want to touch you.' 'And if you did touch me, what then?' 'I would find a language of beginning.

And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman!s fortune or one man!s loss. And we can!t know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen.

I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone.

She is like a mathematical equation, always there and impossible to disprove.

I said, If we were good always would we be happy always? No, said Grandmother. Then I shall be bad.

It is necessary to distinguish the chalk circle from the stone wall.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through.

The cities of the interior are vast and do not lie on any map.

In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge.

Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table.

I walked round the block thinking I'd think about it, but my legs were heading home, and sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do.

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It's the playing that's irresistible.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

I put the words into a flask and flung them out to sea. Flung them far out from me, made through myself, but not myself. Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine. The world is packed tight with fools.