Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Hope is a duty. Hope is our reality. Shelley says so and he believes it so, but for me the light has gone out. The light inside and the light outside. I have no lantern and no lighthouse. I am at sea in waves too high and the rocks wreck me.

We have returned to Italy because we cannot live in England. Small-minded, smug, self-righteous, unjust, a country that hates the stranger, whether that stranger be a foreigner or an atheist, or a poet, or a thinker, or a radical, or a woman. For women are strange to men.

To lose someone you love Is to alter your life forever... The pain stops, there are new people, But the gap never closes... This hole in your hear is the shape of the one you lost- No one else can fit it.

the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of braille.

In fact, there are more than two chances - many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us. This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That's the problem--the awful thing is you.

This holiday mood of Napoleon's was almost a madness. He had appeared at dinner two nights ago dressed as the Pontiff and lewdly asked Joséphine how intimate she would like to be with God. I stared into the chicken.

Under the night rug, the star rug, moon as lantern, man in the moon watching over us, dog star at his heels, we lay.

In any case, could it be worse than human? I read today that humans have wiped out sixty per cent of animal wildlife since 1970. In Brazil we have a dictator posting as a democratically elected president who is opening up the Amazon to commercial interests. Human beings really don't have a better chance than AI. We are too late for anything else.

All our faults, vanities, idiocies, prejudices, cruelty. Do you really want augmented humans, superhumans, uploaded humans, forever humans, with all the shit that comes with us? Morally and spiritually, we are barely crawling out of the sea onto dry land. We're not ready for the future you want. Have we ever been ready? said Victor. Progress is a series of accidents, of mistakes made in a hurry, of unforeseen consequences.

Everyone knows a homosexual is no closer to being a woman than a rhinoceros.

I looked back at you. These moments that are talismans and treasure

All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

I keep seeing my life darting off in the different directions it could have taken, as chance and circumstance, temperament and desire, open and close, open and close gates, routes, roadways. And yet there feels like an inevitability to who I am--just as of all the planets in all the universes, planet blue, this planet Earth, is the one that is home.

She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.

El perro corría al lado de chico, y contempló en el cielo despejado los perros estelares, fríos y bellos, y supo que, pidas lo que pidas, no se puede pedir nada mejor que el amor

Yeah, there's plenty of people like me who don't live in their brains, because there's not much going on up there. If I was just my brain I'd be really miserable.

Our only hope has always been that the hate-filled old white guys die off and young people are more progressive.

What could he know at two months old, head like a question mark?

What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events? How much of recollection is invention? Whose invention?

Las palabras son la parte del silencio que puede ser hablada

He had seen the vision of perfect heroism and, for a fleeting moment, the vision of perfect peace. He sought it again, to balance him. He was a warrior who longed to grow herbs.

What you are pursuing is meaning -- a meaningful life. There's the hap -- the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whichever metaphor you want to use -- that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

I made him walk on a lead and he jumped for joy, the way creatures do, and children do and adults don't do, and spend their lives wondering where the leap went.