Jeanette Winterson Quotes: 33

• Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

• The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.

• Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.

• Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.

• As your lover describes you, so you are.

  Sexing the Cherry

• I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

• What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

• The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.

  Sexing the Cherry

• I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

• He: What’s the matter with you?Me: Nothing.Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.

  Gut Symmetries

• Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

  Written on the Body

• Why is the measure of love loss?

  Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

• Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.

  The Passion

• 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?

• In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

• You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

  Written on the Body

• I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

  Lighthousekeeping

• Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.

  Written on the Body

• Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

• The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

• Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

• 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.

  Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

• Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.

  Written on the Body

• Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

  Sexing the Cherry

• Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

• Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

  Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

• A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

  Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

  The Passion

• Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

  Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

  Written on the Body