Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

A woman who slaves for a man does not have a marriage; she has a master.

It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.

What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end.

Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the saem as being happy - which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine. If the sun is shining, stand in it - yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass - they have to - because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life.

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

One of us hadn't finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you're not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?

There's no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear.

We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.

Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandones class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.

Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn't our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets

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 the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun.

I had lines inside me-a string of guiding lights. I had language.

I discover that grief means living with someone who is not there.

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion—in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots—apologies there, Spike—but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.

Take two people. Slice lengthways. Boil with the lid on. Add a marriage, a past, another woman. Sugar to taste. Pass through a chance meeting. Lubricate sparingly. Serve on a bed of – or is it in a bed of –? Use fresh and top with raw emotion.

I am desperately looking the other way so that love won't see me.

It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

En de tijd die zo gestaag en zo zeker voorbijgaat slaat voorbij de klokken op hol. Het kost zo weinig tijd om een leven te veranderen en het kost een heel leven om die verandering te begrijpen.

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here.

The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.

It's always the same with diversions; you get involved.

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

THERE'S NO SUCH thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear. What I learned about war in the years before I came to this lonely place were things any child could have told me. 'Will you kill people, Henri?' 'Not people, Louise, just the enemy.' 'What is enemy?' 'Someone who's not on your side.