Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.”

— Jeanette Winterson

452. “I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first.”

— Jeanette Winterson

453. “How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?”

— Jeanette Winterson

454. “I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively.”

— Jeanette Winterson

455. “Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.”

— Jeanette Winterson

456. “The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.”

— Jeanette Winterson

457. “She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.”

— Jeanette Winterson

458. “En de tijd die zo gestaag en zo zeker voorbijgaat slaat voorbij de klokken op hol. Het kost zo weinig tijd om een leven te veranderen en het kost een heel leven om die verandering te begrijpen.”

— Jeanette Winterson

459. “We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.”

— Jeanette Winterson

460. “You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved.”

— Jeanette Winterson

461. “Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.”

— Jeanette Winterson

462. “And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.”

— Jeanette Winterson

463. “When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.”

— Jeanette Winterson

464. “With animal behavior, they’re all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.”

— Jeanette Winterson

465. “She is like a mathematical equation, always there and impossible to disprove.”

— Jeanette Winterson

466. “Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I’m really a flight animal.”

— Jeanette Winterson

467. “Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

468. “There are valleys that lead to the bottom of the world, so it seems, but what world is that? The universe has no sides, no end, can’t be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness. The more sophisticated my equipment, the stranger the worlds it detects. I sometimes think I’m sailing through a vast thought.”

— Jeanette Winterson

469. “I want to get to the end and feel that I’ve done all I could, given the limitations and given the opportunities.”

— Jeanette Winterson

470. “Everyone assumed it had to be some sort of biography, because if you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you’re a man, you’re actually doing some post-modern play on the novel, some critique on identity with lots of references to Foucault.”

— Jeanette Winterson

471. “My books always begin with a sentence and an image – not necessarily connected.”

— Jeanette Winterson

472. “Why doesn’t she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can’t get warm... She won’t be cold. She has the sun inside her.”

— Jeanette Winterson

473. “But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?”

— Jeanette Winterson

474. “I know I’ve had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t make it speak to other people.”

— Jeanette Winterson

475. “It’s true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn’t they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?”

— Jeanette Winterson

476. “There’s a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn’t seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books are activities that you do after-hours, rather than things that are at the heart of life. That’s a huge change.”

— Jeanette Winterson

477. “Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.”

— Jeanette Winterson

478. “Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.”

— Jeanette Winterson

479. “When Lot’s wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it’s a poor exchange for losing your self.”

— Jeanette Winterson

480. “Why do humans need answers? Partly I suppose because without one, almost any one, the question itself soon sounds silly.”

— Jeanette Winterson

481. “When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been.”

— Jeanette Winterson

482. “I tried to build an igloo out of orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn’t have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about ‘How Eskimo Got Eaten’, which made me even more miserable. It’s always the same with diversions; you get involved.”

— Jeanette Winterson

483. “There is so little life, and it is fraught with chance. We meet, we don’t meet, we take the wrong turning, and still bump into each other. We conscientiously choose the ‘right road’ and it leads nowhere.”

— Jeanette Winterson

484. “I didn’t mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.”

— Jeanette Winterson

485. “I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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486. “If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.”

— Jeanette Winterson

487. “I need the dark places to get outside of common sense.”

— Jeanette Winterson

488. “Once out of the body you will be able to choose any form you like, and change it as often as you like. Animal, vegetable, mineral. The gods appeared in human form and animal form, and they changed others into trees or birds. Those were stories about the future. We have always known that we are not limited to the shape we inhabit.”

— Jeanette Winterson

489. “Being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

490. “I have come so far so fast that I haven’t had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be.”

— Jeanette Winterson

491. “I want to be an art-hero – I want to change the form of the novel.”

— Jeanette Winterson

492. “Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn’t there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain sides. Your red hair blazing and you are saying, “Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one.”

— Jeanette Winterson

493. “My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight’s not on them. But they do get somewhere.”

— Jeanette Winterson

494. “Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.”

— Jeanette Winterson

495. “If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she’d either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.”

— Jeanette Winterson

496. “The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what’s in front of us in the service of what’s lost.”

— Jeanette Winterson

497. “There are voices and they must be heard.”

— Jeanette Winterson

498. “He loves books,’ said Perdita. ‘Yeah. He does. When you’ve finished a book you can put it away and it doesn’t ask to see you again.”

— Jeanette Winterson

499. “I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.”

— Jeanette Winterson

500. “Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.”

— Jeanette Winterson