Jeanette Winterson Quote #1
...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #2
...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #3
...what he told himself on those sea-soaked nights...Others joined in and it was discovered that every light had a story-no, every light was a story. And the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #4
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #5
A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
Jeanette Winterson Quote #6
A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
Jeanette Winterson Quote #7
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.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #8
A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #9
Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #10
After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, I fuck therefore I am.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #11
And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #12
And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?
Jeanette Winterson Quote #13
And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #14
Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?
Jeanette Winterson Quote #15
Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #16
Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #17
Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #18
As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #19
As your lover describes you, so you are.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #20
At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #21
Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?'
Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.'
'How can I escape my fate?'
'You must choose your destiny.Jeanette Winterson Quote #22
Be with someone you don't want to be without.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #23
Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I'll take a chance.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #24
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.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #25
Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #26
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.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #27
But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup.
As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. 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. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. 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 the destroyed.Jeanette Winterson Quote #28
By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #29
Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.
Jeanette Winterson Quote #30
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
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