01c. 1959 ADI have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADI was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADPart broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADFor fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
06c. 1959 AD...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go downJeanette Winterson / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADI thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
09c. 1959 ADThere's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that.There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you.Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
10c. 1959 ADExplore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADLong looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
12c. 1959 ADThe riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
13c. 1959 ADIt is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
14c. 1959 ADWide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six months getting up an hour early to try to understand economics because I need to. I don’t want to be one of these bewildered schmucks. The things that you understand will inform your writing. The bigger your mind, the better your work is going to be. You’re not born with a big mind; you have to build it. If I don’t read for an hour a day, I get ill.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
15c. 1959 ADSo when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in 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 to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
17c. 1959 ADThere is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It’s much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADThere is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
21c. 1959 ADPerhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
22c. 1959 ADEarth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past.Of time to come, she says much, but who listens?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
24c. 1959 ADI did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life or the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
