Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

The past is magnetic. It draws us in.

What you risk reveals what you value. In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.

U]nhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.

The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late.' I thought to myself, 'Too late for what?

Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time.

They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.

I know the calcium of your cheekbones. I know the weapon of your jaw. I have held your head in my hands but I have never held you. Not you in your spaces, spirit, electrons of life.

Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.

It is going dark. There are bombs exploding. Alice is losing patience. She throws down the map and shouts at Gertrude: 'THIS IS THE WRONG ROAD.' Gertrude drives on. She says, 'Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.

On the one side there were those who claimed that love, if it be allowed bat all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house. On the other there were those who believed that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night.

Feeling. I didn't want to feel.

What is unconscious does not speak and that includes the hidden parts of himself.

De ce sunt oare oamenii lasati s? creasc? f?r? a avea aparatura necesar? pentru a lua deciziile morale cele mai s?n?toase?

Of course people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things, so there's no need to take it personally.

I have learned, painfully, over the years that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

None can know the human mind. No, not if he read every thought man ever wrote. Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness.

And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate.

Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.

How else could it be with such consuming hair?

The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe.

Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it's not an absence of feeling?

And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

If you can't survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own.

Vertel me een verhaal, Silver. Wat voor verhaal? Het verhaal van wat daarna gebeurde. Dat hangt ervan af. Waarvan? Van hoe ik het vertel.