Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.

If you're a hero you can be an idiot, behave badly, ruin your personal life, have any number of mistresses and talk about yourself all the time, and nobody minds. Heroes are immune. They have wide shoulders and plenty of hair and wherever they go a crowd gathers. Mostly they enjoy the company of other men, although attractive women are part of their reward.

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Lonely cries, and she was lonely, not for friends but for a time that hadn't been violated.

The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.

It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

What could I do? My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she'd do what most people do when confronted with something they don't understand: Panic.

Melanie,' I plucked up courage to ask at last, 'why do you have such a funny name?' She blushed. 'When I was born I looked like a melon.' 'Don't worry,' I reassured her, 'you don't any more.

Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.

Her favourite song was 'God Has Blotted Them Out,' which was meant to be about sins, but really was about anyone who had ever annoyed her, which was everyone. She just didn't like anyone and she just didn't like life. Life was a burden to be carried as far as the grave and then dumped. Life was a Vale of Tears. Life was a pre-death experience.

For now, I had to be hard and white. In the frosty days, in the winter, the ground is white, then the sun rises,, and the frosts melt...

The Romantics didn't need [the bible] because they found their own fire; but almost every other quasi-revolt has gone back to it, because when the heart revolts, it wants outrageous things that cannot possibly be factual. Robes and incense and larger-than-life and miracles and heroes.

I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.

Time was my Medusa. Time was turning me to stone.

One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone.

Here's my life - I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed.

Sanity is the thread through the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Once cut, or unravelled, all that lies in wait are gloomy tunnels unfathomable by any map, and what hides there is a beast in human form, wearing our own face. We are what we fear.

With only our imaginations . . . we can't remember what it is about women that can turn a man through passion into something holy.

If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.

I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed.

Can love really belong to the demon?

She laughed. "What about your wings?" she said. "How can you forget those when the stumps are still deep in your shoulder-blades?" I didn't say anything. In the Bible only the angels have wings; the rest of us have to wait to be rescued.

When we buried my mother, some of the light went out of me, and it seemed proper that I should go and live in a place where all the light shone outwards and none of it was there for us. Pew