Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Discipline Quotes, Inspirational Quotes for Work, Friday Quotes for Work, Friday Motivational Quotes, Creative Quotes

2. “Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading, Fiction Quotes, Imagination Quotes, Creative Quotes, Reading Quotes

3. “In this life, you have to be your own hero.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Self-Love Quotes, Be Yourself Quotes, Strong Women Quotes

4. “Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don’t give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Self-Love Quotes, Love Life Quotes, Valentine's Day Quotes, Cute Love Quotes, Happy Valentine's Day Quotes

5. “There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.”

— Jeanette Winterson

6. “This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”

— Jeanette Winterson

7. “I don’t know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.”

— Jeanette Winterson

8. “It’s hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.”

— Jeanette Winterson

9. “Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Reading Quotes

10. “Book 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.”

— Jeanette Winterson

11. “Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

12. “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.”

— Jeanette Winterson

13. “You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.”

— Jeanette Winterson

14. “Life is so simple when you’re just doing your job.”

— Jeanette Winterson

15. “When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Regret Quotes

16. “Trust me, I’m telling you stories.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

17. “Books, 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 a different kind of space.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Reading Quotes

18. “Only the impossible is worth the effort.”

— Jeanette Winterson

19. “No emotion is the final one.”

— Jeanette Winterson

20. “Trust your creativity.”

— Jeanette Winterson

21. “Don’t regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.”

— Jeanette Winterson

22. “In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”

— Jeanette Winterson

23. “Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there.”

— Jeanette Winterson

24. “Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.”

— Jeanette Winterson

25. “When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

26. “What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.”

— Jeanette Winterson

27. “I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.”

— Jeanette Winterson

28. “The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

29. “The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.”

— Jeanette Winterson

30. “Life cannot be calculated. That’s the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation – it is part of the equation.”

— Jeanette Winterson

31. “The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete.”

— Jeanette Winterson

32. “In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun.”

— Jeanette Winterson

33. “She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

34. “Why is the measure of love loss?”

— Jeanette Winterson

35. “Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.”

— Jeanette Winterson

36. “I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.”

— Jeanette Winterson

37. “Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Fun Quotes

38. “In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren’t let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.”

— Jeanette Winterson

39. “Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.”

— Jeanette Winterson

40. “Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”

— Jeanette Winterson

41. “Happy ending are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.”

— Jeanette Winterson

42. “It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose.”

— Jeanette Winterson

43. “Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

44. “When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don’t do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.”

— Jeanette Winterson

45. “I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Strong Quotes

46. “I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Romance Quotes

47. “To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”

— Jeanette Winterson

48. “Somewhere between fear and sex passion is.”

— Jeanette Winterson

49. “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

— Jeanette Winterson

50. “Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.”

— Jeanette Winterson