Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry.”

— Jeanette Winterson

452. “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

453. “I’ve never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.”

— Jeanette Winterson

454. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

456. “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

457. “The fact is that every atom that we’re made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We’re connected to the entire universe.”

— Jeanette Winterson

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

465. “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

466. “History is a madman’s museum.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

470. “Why doesn’t every mother believer her child can change the world? The child can. This is the joke. Here we are still looking for a saviour and hundreds are being born every second. Look at it, this tiny capsule of new life, indifferent to your prejudices, your miseries, unmindful of the world already made. Make it again? They could if we let them, but we make sure they grow up just like us, fearful like us. Don’t let them know the potential that they are.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

472. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

476. “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

477. “My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o’clock. Perhaps that’s why I try and have my crises in the evening.”

— Jeanette Winterson

478. “Atlas, Atlas, Atlas. It’s in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas – it means ‘the long suffering one’.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

480. “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

481. “I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.”

— Jeanette Winterson

482. “Today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

485. “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

486. “Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness.”

— Jeanette Winterson

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

491. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

495. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

497. “There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

499. “For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.”

— Jeanette Winterson

500. “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