Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.”

— Jeanette Winterson

152. “Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.”

— Jeanette Winterson

153. “Time was my Medusa. Time was turning me to stone.”

— Jeanette Winterson

154. “Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don’t accept things for their face value; you don’t have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

155. “I don’t hate men, I just wish they’d try harder. Theyall want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That’s not the kind of heroism they enjoy.”

— Jeanette Winterson

156. “I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”

— Jeanette Winterson

157. “Life has never been All or Nothing- it’s All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.”

— Jeanette Winterson

158. “Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.”

— Jeanette Winterson

159. “There are only three possible endings -aren’t there? – to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.”

— Jeanette Winterson

160. “It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise than how should I call it love?”

— Jeanette Winterson

161. “My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.”

— Jeanette Winterson

162. “If people aren’t educated, they can’t question. If they can’t question, they can’t change anything, which is great for the status quo and all the people who can question them at their own level.”

— Jeanette Winterson

163. “Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith.”

— Jeanette Winterson

164. “I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.”

— Jeanette Winterson

165. “Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.”

— Jeanette Winterson

166. “History is not a suicide note – it is a record of our survival.”

— Jeanette Winterson

167. “Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.”

— Jeanette Winterson

168. “Destiny is a worrying concept. I don’t want to be fated, I want to choose.”

— Jeanette Winterson

169. “The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.”

— Jeanette Winterson

170. “The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.”

— Jeanette Winterson

171. “In my country there are no gods left. The Romans have driven them out. There are some who say that they have hidden themselves in the mountains, but I do not believe it. Three nights I have been on the mountains seeking them everywhere. I did not find them. And at last I called them by their names, and they did not come. I think they are dead.”

— Jeanette Winterson

172. “If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches.”

— Jeanette Winterson

173. “They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?”

— Jeanette Winterson

174. “They never say, I love you with all my kidneys. I love you with my liver. They never say, my gall bladder is yours and yours alone. No one says, she broke my appendix.”

— Jeanette Winterson

175. “Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.”

— Jeanette Winterson

176. “There are different sorts of treachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. She burnt a lot more than the letters that night in the backyard. I don’t think she knew. In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.”

— Jeanette Winterson

177. “Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

178. “August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don’t you? 92 degrees even in the shade.”

— Jeanette Winterson

179. “Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.”

— Jeanette Winterson

180. “Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it’s a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time.”

— Jeanette Winterson

181. “Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.”

— Jeanette Winterson

182. “I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?”

— Jeanette Winterson

183. “I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.”

— Jeanette Winterson

184. “It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.”

— Jeanette Winterson

185. “Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.”

— Jeanette Winterson

186. “Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”

— Jeanette Winterson

187. “The third is to refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it is given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

188. “Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.”

— Jeanette Winterson

189. “There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.”

— Jeanette Winterson

190. “She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.”

— Jeanette Winterson

191. “History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.”

— Jeanette Winterson

192. “There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.”

— Jeanette Winterson

193. “Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.”

— Jeanette Winterson

194. “Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.”

— Jeanette Winterson

195. “Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

196. “Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.”

— Jeanette Winterson

197. “In Venice, a long time ago, when we had our own calendar and stayed aloof from the world, we began the days at night. What use was the sun to us when our trade and our secrets and our diplomacy depended on darkness? In the dark you are in disguise and this is the city of disguises.”

— Jeanette Winterson

198. “The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.”

— Jeanette Winterson

199. “There’s this world,’ she banged the wall graphically, ‘and there’s this world,’ she thumped her chest. ‘If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.”

— Jeanette Winterson

200. “We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.”

— Jeanette Winterson