Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand.

Most of us can only see the world we know.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. 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.

How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.

we have to know what we are doing, pretending an order that doesn't exist, to make a security that cannot exist.

There is the sailor sea and the commercial sea, the oil-well sea and the fishy sea. The sea that tests the land through sublunary power. The rise and fall of the harbour sea and the sea that exists to make maps look prettier. But the functional sea is not the final sea. There is that other sea simply itself.

Even being good has unintended consequences. You're only human, after all.

The future is not fixed unless we allow it to be so.

And memories, sometimes, are places we go to honor the dead.

Love is not a pristine planet before contaminants and pollutants, before the arrival of Man. Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.

time is what shields us from eternity.

en la escuela siempre

You can always tell a good woman by her sandwiches

We were in Ireland. Was there ever a country so damp? I had to wring out my mind to think clearly. I was a morning mist of confusion.

Is it because she will return that I take pleasure in being alone? Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

our outside loo, known as the Betty, was a good loo; whitewashed and compact with a flashlight hanging behind the door. I smuggled books in there to read them in secret, claiming constipation.

This is the city of uncertainty, where routes and faces look alike and are not. Death will be like that. We will forever be recognizing people we have never met. But darkness and death are not the same. One is temporary, the other is not.

But no work, no home, no health care, no hope--that's the everyday life of millions, billions of people. To me, that's the threat. And climate change is the threat. And war, and drought and famine... OK, so we need security. A secure future. No! We need to be free from corporate control that runs the world for the few and ruins it for the rest of us.

Until we learn to stop dying Tom, we have to live with the consequences. There's no room for the dead unless you treat them as ornamental.

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.

I hate this hospital. I sat in the car like this after my wife died. Staring out of the windscreen seeing nothing. The whole day passed and then it was night and nothing had changed because everything had changed.

I have found that I am not a space where people want to live. At least not without decorating first.

Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?

I nodded. He threw his paper at me. Here, keep up with the world, even if you don't want to join it.