01c. 1959 ADyour morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADAdoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone loves you for yourself.I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value.I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. Why is the measure of love loss?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADI have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADWho taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADShe arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADEvery moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
08c. 1959 ADInfatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
09c. 1959 ADYou have a dress with a décolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
10c. 1959 ADLovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADThe tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
12c. 1959 ADPassion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
14c. 1959 ADNo. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
16c. 1959 ADAre we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
17c. 1959 ADShe knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADThe human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
19c. 1959 ADWhen Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.Jordan...I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
20c. 1959 ADChildren do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
21c. 1959 ADNowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
22c. 1959 ADReading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
23c. 1959 ADSaddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
24c. 1959 ADMrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- "When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
