JWJeanette Winterson

295 collected words

Jeanette Winterson

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

02Undated

I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

03Undated

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

Jeanette Winterson / quote

04Undated

If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely 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 / quote

05Undated

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

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.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

08Undated

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.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

09Undated

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

Jeanette Winterson / quote

10Undated

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

11Undated

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

12Undated

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

13Undated

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I started to cry.(…)The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family—the first one was not my fault, but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault.I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels.I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me.So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. 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.It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

14Undated

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

15Undated

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

16Undated

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

17Undated

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

Jeanette Winterson / quote

18Undated

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

19Undated

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state.[Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

20Undated

There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

21Undated

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

22Undated

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

23Undated

St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.

Jeanette Winterson / quote

24Undated

I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.

Jeanette Winterson / quote