Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”

— Jeanette Winterson

102. “We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.”

— Jeanette Winterson

103. “When I hold you in this night-soaked bed it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. It couldn’t be simpler. It couldn’t be harder. In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.”

— Jeanette Winterson

104. “Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught by a radio receiver, light years later, like a recorded message nobody heard, back-played now into infinity across time. Love and loss.”

— Jeanette Winterson

105. “True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction – don’t believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.”

— Jeanette Winterson

106. “I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.”

— Jeanette Winterson

107. “She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that’s partly why they love me, and partly why they leave.”

— Jeanette Winterson

108. “The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.”

— Jeanette Winterson

109. “Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land.”

— Jeanette Winterson

110. “People 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 can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what’s left. Going 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

111. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

— Jeanette Winterson

112. “Reading is a life-long collision with minds not like your own.”

— Jeanette Winterson

113. “I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.”

— Jeanette Winterson

114. “Y’know, Nature’s unpredictable – that’s why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.”

— Jeanette Winterson

115. “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. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

116. “Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you’ll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.”

— Jeanette Winterson

117. “What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end.”

— Jeanette Winterson

118. “What is a memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?”

— Jeanette Winterson

119. “You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We’re absolutely not.”

— Jeanette Winterson

120. “I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here.”

— Jeanette Winterson

121. “You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That’s a real challenge.”

— Jeanette Winterson

122. “The wider we read the freer we become.”

— Jeanette Winterson

123. “I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.”

— Jeanette Winterson

124. “He doesn’t take a photo or a video because he wants to remember – by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can’t capture.”

— Jeanette Winterson

125. “I was never bored except in the company of others.”

— Jeanette Winterson

126. “I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.”

— Jeanette Winterson

127. “Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run?”

— Jeanette Winterson

128. “Only in death may we be reunited with those we have lost. For myself, I do not seek death but neither do I fear that which will bring me peace.”

— Jeanette Winterson

129. “Very often history is a means of denying the past.”

— Jeanette Winterson

130. “Hox is a racing word: it means to hamstring a horse not so brutally that she can’t walk but cleverly so that she can’t run. Society hoxes women and pretends that God, Nature or the genepool designed them lame.”

— Jeanette Winterson

131. “But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.”

— Jeanette Winterson

132. “When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.”

— Jeanette Winterson

133. “That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.”

— Jeanette Winterson

134. “You are a pool of clear water where the light plays.”

— Jeanette Winterson

135. “I am thinking of a certain September: Wood pigeon Red Admiral Yellow Harvest Orange Night. You said, ‘I love you.’ Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? ‘I love you’ is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.”

— Jeanette Winterson

136. “You’re never alone with a book, are you? It’s a dialogue.”

— Jeanette Winterson

137. “I don’t know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.”

— Jeanette Winterson

138. “If I let them take away my demons, I’ll have to give up what I’ve found.”

— Jeanette Winterson

139. “Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.”

— Jeanette Winterson

140. “Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.”

— Jeanette Winterson

141. “The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: ‘Never let a boy touch you down there.’ I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.”

— Jeanette Winterson

142. “Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can’t be logical about.”

— Jeanette Winterson

143. “I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”

— Jeanette Winterson

144. “Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don’t help anybody to develop their spirituality.”

— Jeanette Winterson

145. “I kissed her and forgot death.”

— Jeanette Winterson

146. “I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.”

— Jeanette Winterson

147. “There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.”

— Jeanette Winterson

148. “The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.”

— Jeanette Winterson

149. “I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

150. “Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you’ll come to me.”

— Jeanette Winterson