Jeanette Winterson Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Art #Thinking #Differences

“You've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Christian #Believe #Gay

“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.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Expression #Glasses #Demand

“The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Writing #Thinking #Way

“Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Dog #Falling In Love #Book

“We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Lying #Thinking #Mazes

“Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Inspirational #Writing #Listening

“Life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It's not really random at all.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Creativity #Order #Patterns

“I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Cutting #Pieces

“You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Cells #Years #Body

“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.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Choices #Important #Theory

“As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#People #Dull #Patterns

“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 a different kind of space.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Book #Home #Space

“People being encouraged to make up their own minds and think for themselves is so important. This world talks endlessly about freedom of choice, but we've never been [nothing] more than a nation of robots. Everybody is seduced by corporate culture.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Thinking #People #Choices

“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Inspirational #World #Breakdown

“The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Stars #Years #Atoms

“There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Half #Alive #Term

“Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Spiritual #Political #Agendas

“I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Love #Future #Mean

“The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Home #Literature #Might

“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.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Years #Leaving #Alive

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Love #Pain #Pregnancy

“Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Love Is #Temptation #Desire

“Their throats were bare for God.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Throat

“It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Want #What You Want

“I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies – unconscious strategies – to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too – sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life. It takes courage to feel the feeling – and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Lonely #Drama #Acceptance

“I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Giving Up #Two #Balance

“The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Numbness #Waiting #Leaving

“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.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Book #Fate #Addiction

“I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”
-- Jeanette Winterson

#Dream #Imagination #Desire