Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

People will believe anything. Except, it seems, the truth.

I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder.

The future is intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was.

A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void. One will cross to the other side. The other will not return. For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And

What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?

History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries.

There's no dark like it. It's soft to the touch and heavy in the hands. You can open your mouth and let it sink into you 'till it makes a close ball in your belly. You can juggle with it, dodge it, swim in it. You can open it like a door.

The photographer frames the shot, writers frame their world.

Invisible worlds, or worlds that are supposed to be invisible interest me. I like to see the effort it takes for some people to make things go smoothly for other people. Don't misunderstand me; mostly I'm part of the invisible world myself.

He's only a dog. Yes but he has found me out.

Humans don't share; we exploit.

So, Ryan, back to my Economy model. In motor-vehicle parlance, she's the cloth-seats and plastic-steering-wheel version. But she gets you from A to B. This model comes only in white. My sister-in-law's a lovely black woman from Jamaica and she said to me, she said, Ron! Don't you dare do an Economy black woman. And I love women, I do, and I thought, yeah, show respect. Also, Bridget would knock the shit out of me.

You are stubborn,' said Roger Nowell. 'I am not tame,' said Alice Nutter.

Perhaps I wasn't a child of God at all, but the daughter of a Frenchman.

Surely a god can meet passion with passion.

Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations.

You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version.. Love is full strenght. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.

Our memories change as we do.

There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and the seven seas but looking for a reason to stay.

It works because the principle of personal space is always the same, whether you're fending off an elemental or someone's bad mood. It's a force field around yourself, and as long as our imagining powers are weak, it's useful to have something to remind us.

I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.

He had never talked of what he wanted to do, where he was going, he never joined in the aimless conversations that clustered round the idea of something better in another time. He didn't believe in the future, only the present, and as our future, our years, had turned so relentlessly into identical presents, I understood him more.

I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life or the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.