01c. 1959 ADExamine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADThe 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.Or the people who found Atlantis.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADAnd our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADHe was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADOnly later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADFreud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADSometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
09c. 1959 ADThe inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
10c. 1959 ADthe buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADDestiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
12c. 1959 ADThe ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
13c. 1959 ADAtlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
14c. 1959 ADCreative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
15c. 1959 ADThere will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
16c. 1959 ADWhat are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
17c. 1959 ADBut if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADLook up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
19c. 1959 ADProgress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
20c. 1959 ADI think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
21c. 1959 ADTime: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
22c. 1959 ADAnd myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
23c. 1959 ADEvery day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
24c. 1959 ADWhy is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
