Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

The third is to refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it is given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox,...that longs for certainty, fidelity, compassion, and plays roulette with anything precious.

Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things.

Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed [...] but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it. [...] We're [the demons] here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it's all part of the paradox.

It is the poet who goes further than any human scientist. The poet who with her dredging net must haul up difficult things and return them to the present.

I believe it is each man's task to awaken his own soul. His soul is that part of him not subject to death and decay; that part of him made alive to truth and beauty. If he has no soul he is a brute. And where does this soul go, at death? said Byron. That is unknown, answered Shelley; the becoming of the soul, not its going, should be our concern. The mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.

I've flown about a bit and picked up a few things and I'll give one of them to you for nothing. You don't run out on the woman you love.

These two images put together explain why men find women so threatening . The world comes out of your body and...' (he was waving the Mona Lisa at me) 'we have no idea what's in your head. Do you know how frightening that is?

there's no choice that doesn't mean a loss

My mother is very like William Blake, she has visions and dreams and she cannot always distinguish a flea's head from a king. Luckily she can't paint.

A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.

yaralanmak, göründüÄŸü kadar?yla, insan olabilmenin bir yolu ya da anahtar?. O bir ?st?rap ya da bir erdem.

Late-night TV and snoring side by side into the millennium. Till death us do part. Anniversary darling? What's wrong with that?

Xeno couldn't manage too much nearness. He was solitary and introverted, with an enthusiasm that people mistook for sociability. He was interested in everything, attentive to people, genuinely kind, and entirely present when he was present. But he was never sorry to close the door at night or to be alone.

I didn't only want Louise's flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. I would have held her to me though time had stripped away the tones and textures of her skin. I could have held her for a thousand years until the skeleton itself rubbed away to dust. What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

I became obsessed with anatomy. If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognise her even when her body had long since fallen away.

The curious are always in some danger.

We had killed them all without firing a shot. I prayed for the snow to fall and bury them for ever. When the snow falls you can almost believe the world is clean again. Is every snowflake different? No one knows.

Diuen que cada floc de neu és diferent. Si això fos cert, com podria el món anar endavant? Com podríem aixecar-nos de les nostres genuflexions? Com podríem recuperar-nos d'una meravella així? Oblidant. No podem tenir massa coses al cap. Només existeix el present i no hi ha res per a recordar.

Everything we do is falling. Even walking is a kind of controlled falling. But that's not the same as failing.

There are thirteen moons every calendar year. They measure time differently on the moon. The moon orbits the earth once every 28 days As though she's looking for something she lost. A long time ago.

I love coming home – and my idea of happiness is to come home to someone I love. We were not able to resolve that difference and what I didn't know was how something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown. The sudden unexpected abandonment, constellated as it was around the idea/impossibility of home, lit a fuse that spat and burned its way towards a walled up opening, smothered in time like an anchorite, was my mother.

the nearness of the wound to the gift