01c. 1959 ADVery often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADAnd 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 ↗
03c. 1959 ADThe future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADWhat are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADTime is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADThe Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADIt could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
08c. 1959 ADThere is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
09c. 1959 ADBook 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 ↗
10c. 1959 ADIn 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.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADBooks and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
12c. 1959 ADI had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
13c. 1959 ADBooks, 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 ↗
14c. 1959 ADWhat worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
15c. 1959 ADYes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. 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 ↗
16c. 1959 ADI wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diffJeanette Winterson / quote ↗
17c. 1959 ADSix books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADReading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxuryJeanette Winterson / quote ↗
19c. 1959 ADEveryone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren’t going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
23c. 1959 ADI dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
