Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

At that time I could not imagine what would become of me, and I didn't care. It was not judgement day, but another morning.

Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it.

The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.

Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

Even our best endeavors turn against us. A loom that can do the work of eight men should free eight men from servitude. Instead, seven skilled men are put out of work to starve with their families, and one skilled man because the unskilled minder of the mechanical loom. What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?

So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.

Then, as now, nobody talked about the legacy of Empire. Britain had colonised, owned, occupied or interfered with half the world. We had carved up some countries and created others. When some of the world we had made by force wanted something in return, we were outraged.

Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?

Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos- and it's pain.

I've thought of killing myself many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence.

I manage my own madness just as you do. And if my heart is broken it keeps beating. That is the strangeness of life.

You're drunk. That's right I am. I'm fifty-three and I'm as wild as a Welshman with a leek up his arse. Fifty-three. Old slag Gail. What right has she to poke her nose into your shining armour? That's what you're thinking isn't it honey?

She had been a career woman all her life. She noted there was no such thing as a career man. She had made her choices. No regrets. But there were losses. There always were.

I walked into you. The white room is a hospital. It happens on the borders between healing and pain. The light is as surgical as a laser. The light finds me out. My soft tissue is exposed. Parts of me have been cut away. I had a wound that would not heal. You rummaged your hands through it and it bled again. It bled clean this time, and the poison left me. That wound has been infected for years. It will never heal but it is not infected anymore. My body is clean.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silences. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody as been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present, but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

Happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.

I don't like the word 'extinction' - it is alarmist That's because being wiped out is alarming, I said Don't be so tabloid, said Victor. Think of it as accelerated evolution.

Maybe then I will remember that, although history repeats itself and we always fall, and I am a carrier of history whose brief excursion into time leaves no mark, I have known something worth knowing, wild and unlikely and against every rote.