01c. 1959 ADIn the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.Feeling is frightening.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADThere is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADZel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADGoing back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADIf I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADI have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADThere's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have been confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
08c. 1959 ADPeople do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
09c. 1959 ADWhen I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
10c. 1959 ADOften when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the pictureJeanette Winterson / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADthe past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
12c. 1959 ADI looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself.I was up to my chin when the shout came, and I will never forget it. Never. For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering — when I can no longer speak, hear me.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
13c. 1959 ADI know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
14c. 1959 ADThe things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
15c. 1959 ADFall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
16c. 1959 ADWhen I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation....When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADWe heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
19c. 1959 ADThose old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
20c. 1959 ADPart fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
21c. 1959 ADEating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
22c. 1959 ADHe needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
23c. 1959 ADThis Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
24c. 1959 ADLiving with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life - to be tame or to be wanton. to be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.And extremes - whether of dullness or fury - successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies - unconscious strategies- to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too - sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.It takes courage to feel the feeling - and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.Jeanette Winterson / quote ↗
