Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

It's snowing. Here I am. Lost and Found.

We were patient enough to count the hairs on each other's heads, too impatient to get undressed. Neither of us had the upper hand, we wore matching wounds.

Here I am. Not leaving any more. Home.

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.

Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.

When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.

I watched him, sardonic, cynical. A great poet, truly, yet unkind. The gifts of our nature seem not to modify the manner of our behaviour.

Hox is a racing word: it means to hamstring a horse not so brutally that she can't walk but cleverly so that she can't run. Society hoxes women and pretends that God, Nature or the genepool designed them lame.

If I am honest I will admit that I have always wanted to avoid love. Yes give me romance, give me sex, give me fights, give me all the parts of love but not the simple single word which is so complex and demands the best of me this hour this minute this forever.

Be with someone you don't want to be without.

I visited a manufactory in Manchester with my father. I saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness. The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.

Money culture recognises no currency but its own. Whatever is not money, whatever is not making money, is useless to it. The entire efforts of our government as directed through our society are efforts towards making more and more money. This favours the survival of the dullest.

If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.

travelling the world and the seven seas

Clo was looking like the cat who got the cream, the kippers, the peanut butter, the sliced chicken and a lifetime's supply of genetically engineered slow-moving mice.

It was a good time. To the pure all things are pure…

Stars in the sky like uncounted chances.

Viitorul, prezentul È™i trecutul nu exist? decât în mintea noastr?, iar de la dep?rtare marginile li se micÈ™oreaz? È™i li se înceÈ›oÈ™eaz? precum graniÈ›ele unor ??ri duÈ™mane, v?zute dintr-un oras plutitor, tocmai de pe bolt?.

?tia ea prea bine c? scriitorii sunt niÈ™te boemi obsedaÈ›i de sex care înc?lcau regulile È™i nu se duceau la munc?.

This is one reason why it remains anarchic even at its most canonised. The modern world is Time's fool. Art is master of itself. But, you may say, who has long hours for a book these days? The answer must be whoever wants to read one. A reader must pick up a book, then the reader must pick up the beat. At that moment the clock is stopped. Now I am getting his beat into my brain (the rhythm is the main thing in writing).

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do

What seems so solid and certain is really part of the ceaseless pull-it-down-build-it-again pattern of history, where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as icon, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold--until it's time to call in the wrecking ball.

I had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike – and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it. Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture. This is one moment . . . know that another . . . Hold on, hold on, hold on.