Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don't really have any choice

Boeken zijn werelden. Iemand die leest, heeft geen enkele moeite meerdere universums te accepteren.

I wondered how anyone finds closeness when violence is so near it.

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.

Spring is about beginning again, and beginning again can be so much harder than staying in the winter of your life. What do you need to do this spring? What needs to begin again? What ground needs to be prepared? What needs to be planted? What needs to be swept away, because it's done? What new life is here? What will be different, this time?

If haunting is anything, perhaps that's what it is; time in the wrong place.

But happiness is not a potato.

Spike came forward and put her arms around me. 'One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

When I was born, I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first first coordinate. There is a lot you can't change when you are kid. But you can pack for the journey.

Fictional characters are the original avatars for writer and reader alike. In this place of freedom we can choose who we want to be. And we can find a spectrum of feeling, experience, sexuality, even anger or murder, not available in daily life.

Writers always put themselves into their work. But you can't just untangle it and take it back to its source.

You can pick up a book but a book can throw you across the room. A book can move you from a comfortable armchair to a rocky place where the sea is. A book can separate you from your husband, your wife, your children, all that you are. It can heal you out of a lifetime of pain. Books are kinetic, and like all huge forces, need to be handled with care.

Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my own.

You don't have to get into writing – it's not like a pair of jeans... The only way to write is to write – the rest may or not follow.

A book is like magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it, you step through.

Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo Sapiens. Who's kidding whom?

what you risk reveals what you value...

because if you are raised on the Bible, you don't just walk away, whatever anybody says.

If there are only four possible endings to any story – comedy, tragedy, revenge and forgiveness –

Congratulations on your Engagement'. But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted.

I've thought of killing myself so many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence.

The body was there, the woman inside disappeared.

Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you it's my own body I touch. Thus she was, here and here. The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. A skeleton key to Bluebeard's chamber. The bloody key that unlocks pain. Wisdom says forget, the body howls.

I libri per me sono una casa. I libri non fanno una casa, sono una casa, nel senso che, così come pari una porta, apri un libro e ci entri. Dentro trovi un'altra dimensione temporale, e un'altra dimensione spaziale. Trovi un calore, un focolare. Mi siedo a leggere un libro e avverto una sensazione di tepore. Come mi succedeva in quelle fredde notti passate sui gradini d'ingresso.