Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

Sempre pensamos que aquilo de que precisamos para transformar tudo — o milagre — está em outro lugar, mas muitas vezes está ali, bem ao nosso lado. Algumas vezes, o milagre somos nós mesmos.

Toplum kad?nlar? topal b?rak?r ve onlar? sakat yaratm?? olan sanki Tanr?, DoÄŸa ya da genetik faktörlermiÅŸ gibi davran?r.

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).

I knew my mother hoped I would blame myself, but I didn't. I knew now where the blame lay. If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

She was an absolutist, and had no time for people who thought cows didn't exist unless you looked at them. Once a thing was created, it was valid for all time. Its value went not up nor down.

I know it is your voice in the corridor but when I run outside the corridor is empty. There is nothing I can do that will make any difference. The last word was yours.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember

I could gamble on another night, reduce myself a little more, but after the tenth night would come the eleventh and the twelfth and so on into the silent space that is the pain of never having enough.

you believe that if every person had enough money, enough work, enough leisure, enough learning, that if they were not oppressed by those above them, or fearful of those below them, humankind would be perfected? Byron asked this in his negative drawl

This isn't a head/heart split or a thinking/feeling split. It is emotional matrix. I can juggle different

got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realise the limitations of my sex.

It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong.

Heterosexual choice is allowed to be the background of a writer's life; its wallpaper. So is maleness. And whiteness. Step out of that and you will be called a feminist writer, a lesbian writer, a gay writer, a woman writer. A black writer. You will never be called a heterosexual writer or a male writer or a white writer. Those signifiers are absorbed into the single word 'writer'.

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

about The Passion and about fiction versus lying, I realise all the obvious things about invention as a way of getting at a deeper truth, and lying as a way of avoiding any truth at all or, worse, creating a nightmare world where nothing is as it seems, where nothing can be depended upon – we know human minds can't cope with that, and then we instinctively cling to the 'strong man', who is usually the biggest liar of the lot.

None of us lives without loss. Or regret. But none of us need live without imagination. We can learn to see past ourselves.

It hasn't been too fashionable to talk about the soul. We live in a material world. Religion is discredited as superstition or, worse, fundamentalism. Spirituality, even when detached from religion, looks a bit hippy, wooly, vague; a comfort-zone for those who can't quite manage life as a biological and chemical accident with miraculous consequences.

The future id foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial.

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate.

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time.

I discovered from my time in the brothel that men's members, if bitten off or otherwise severed, do not grow again. This seems a great mistake on the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking.