Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving.

where Perceval, searching for the Grail, is given a vision of it one day, and then, because he is unable to ask the crucial question, the Grail disappears. Perceval spends twenty years wandering in the woods, looking for the thing that he found, that was given to him, that seemed so easy, that was not.

The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen. But I was alive. And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the pieces of my broken mind.

Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people keep fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.

The midgets acted all of the tragedies and many of the comedies. They acted them all at once, and it was fortunate that Tetrahedron had so many faces, otherwise he might have died of fatigue. They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished. Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.

Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life - to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life. And extremes - whether of dullness or fury - successfully prevent feeling.

I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea.

It did make me hate them – not all the time – but with the hatred of the helpless; a flaring, subsiding hatred that gradually became the bed of the relationship. A hatred made of coal, and burning low like coal, and fanned up every time there was another crime, another punishment.

That night, I knew I would get away, better myself. Not because I despised who I was, but because I did not know who I was. I was waiting to be invented. I was waiting to invent myself.

Necesitaba palabras porque las familias infelices son un pacto de silencio. Quien rompa el silencio jamás será perdonado.

HE: History has no smell. ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it? HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present.

I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy.

Does the body hate itself so much that it seeks release at any cost?

Bombay. Cairo. Paris. New York. I've been to those places now. The curious thing is that no matter how different they are, people are all preoccupied with the same things, that is, the same thing; how to live. We have to eat, we want to make money, but in every pause the question returns: How shall I live?

You deciphered me and now I am plain to read.

The future of women is uncertain. We don't breed in the womb any more, and if we aren't wanted for sex … But there will always be men. Women haven't gone for little boys. Women have a different approach. Surrounded by hunks, they look for 'the ugly man inside'. Thugs and gangsters, rapists and wife-beaters are making a comeback. They may smile like beach-boys, but they are pure shark. So this is the future. F is for Future.

We gamble with the hope of winning, but it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us

She was night-time and words were the dream.

If the demons lived anywhere it was here.

What other places are there in the world than those discovered on a lover's body?

If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches