Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

She had navigated her parents' hostile waters with a child's discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. Learning to hide love.

All time is eternally present and so all time is ours, There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming.

I discovered from my time in the brother that men's members, if bitten off or otherwise severed, do not grow again. This seems a great mistake on the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking.

It would not be the first time that Jove and Stella had covered the traces of where I began and where they ended. I liked the playfulness of the lovers' argument: who are you and who am I? Which of us is which? Liked it less when the erotic twinhood developed into forged letters and faked signatures.

I love you. The three most difficult words in the world. But what else can I say?

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently

If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession.

Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me.

For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text?

There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.

My passion for her showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else

There is a spontaneous round of applause in the hall... Victor looks unhappy. He wouldn't call it unhappy, he would call it misunderstood. He waits... Then he does one of the things he does so well -- heads out of the sciences and into the arts: To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world.

This is the city of disguises.

I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical.

Humans have given away all their power to a "they". You aren't able to fight the system because without the system none of you can survive. You made a world without alternatives, and now it is dying, and your new world already belongs to "they".' 'I

It is not always possible to forgive oneself. And sometimes you make a choice to do something, knowing that you must do it, and that forgiveness is impossible.

Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life.

My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat.

If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me.

I will set you in the sky and name you. I will hide you in the earth like treasure.

So what is it to be? Banality of convention or banality of individuation? Shall I choose society's clichés or my own? Is it a step forward to have understood that there is no real difference between them?

I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them.

Getting older happens suddenly. It's like swimming out to sea and realising that the shore you're making for isn't the shore where you started out.

Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.