Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

In Venice, a long time ago, when we had our own calendar and stayed aloof from the world, we began the days at night. What use was the sun to us when our trade and our secrets and our diplomacy depended on darkness? In the dark you are in disguise and this is the city of disguises.

The saggy armchair of clichés.

Why doesn't every mother believer her child can change the world? The child can. This is the joke. Here we are still looking for a saviour and hundreds are being born every second. Look at it, this tiny capsule of new life, indifferent to your prejudices, your miseries, unmindful of the world already made. Make it again? They could if we let them, but we make sure they grow up just like us, fearful like us. Don't let them know the potential that they are.

Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.

Los niños adoptados nos autoinventamos porque no tenemos otra salida; hay una ausencia, un vacío, un signo de interrogación justo al principio de nuestras vidas. Una parte crucial se ha ido, y de forma violenta, como una bomba en el útero materno.

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.

Engem nem a tények érdekelnek, Domino, hanem az, hogy hogyan érzek. Az, ahogy akkor érezni fogok, más lesz; arra akarok emlékezni, ahogy most érzek.

And you and me in the car where we've always been, where we'll always be, this night, this road, even when we're gone and the road is gone and the city is gone but we'll be here because everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.

In what way am I any better? She is smug. I am cynical. She is puffed-up. I am punctured. I watch her gamely finding the energy to thrash about on life's greasy surface, while I lie paralysed, croaking about another life I think I can see.

My own heart, like this wild place, has never been visited, and I do not know whether it could sustain life.

Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

Cuando eres un niño solitario siempre encuentras un amigo imaginario.

A work of art is abundant, spills out, gets drunk, sits up with you all night and forgets to close the curtains, dries your tears, is your friend, offers you a disguise, a difference, a pose. Cut and cut it through and there is still a diamond at the core. Skim the top and it is rich. The inexhaustible energy of art is transfusion for a worn-out world. When I read Virginia Woolf she is to my spirit, waterfall and wine.

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.

When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love - its quality - to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.

Reading is a life-long collision with minds not like your own.

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.

Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.

Didn't they like you? Didn't they, like you, need a heart that was a book with no last page? Turn the leaves.

when the universe exploded like a bomb, it started ticking like a bomb too. we know our sun will die, in another hundred million years or so, then the lights will go out and there will be no light to read by anymore.

First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.

There is talk in the village that there is more in these sewers than sewage. Yes, I say, Yes. But not only these sewers. There is more in your heart than can be spoken. More in your eyes than you will tell. More in the mind of you than anyone can know. More in the night than darkness. More in the river than can be dredged. [...] If I have secrets so do you.

Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?