Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.”

— Jeanette Winterson

452. “It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

459. “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

460. “History is a madman’s museum.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

464. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

466. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

470. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

478. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

487. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

492. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

494. “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

495. “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

496. “In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.”

— Jeanette Winterson

497. “To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.”

— Jeanette Winterson

498. “And 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

499. “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

500. “There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer’s fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.”

— Jeanette Winterson