Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies.”

— Jeanette Winterson

202. “Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, ‘Boredom, fetch me a plaything.’ He said ‘Very good ma’am,’ and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

203. “A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through.”

— Jeanette Winterson

204. “To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run...”

— Jeanette Winterson

205. “What the myths say, is that you have to be the hero of your own life. You’re the one who has to take charge of who you are, you’re the one who has to take control. And also, you’re the one who can bring something to the community.”

— Jeanette Winterson

206. “How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

207. “I have a head for heights it’s true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.”

— Jeanette Winterson

208. “Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.”

— Jeanette Winterson

209. “To create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement.”

— Jeanette Winterson

210. “We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that’s true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.”

— Jeanette Winterson

211. “Going back after a long time will make you made, 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

212. “All of one’s life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.”

— Jeanette Winterson

213. “She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.”

— Jeanette Winterson

214. “He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil. Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

215. “Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”

— Jeanette Winterson

216. “I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”

— Jeanette Winterson

217. “What you think is the heart might well be another organ.”

— Jeanette Winterson

218. “Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.”

— Jeanette Winterson

219. “One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.”

— Jeanette Winterson

220. “I had huge ambition for literature. I don’t see the point of doing anything if you don’t have ambition for it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

221. “People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.”

— Jeanette Winterson

222. “Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?”

— Jeanette Winterson

223. “When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

224. “If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

225. “I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people’s emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.”

— Jeanette Winterson

226. “Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one.”

— Jeanette Winterson

227. “Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.”

— Jeanette Winterson

228. “Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you’ve lost forever. There is only now.”

— Jeanette Winterson

229. “The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.”

— Jeanette Winterson

230. “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?”

— Jeanette Winterson

231. “Reading is where the wild things are.”

— Jeanette Winterson

232. “One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.”

— Jeanette Winterson

233. “I return to problems i can’t solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can’t be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.”

— Jeanette Winterson

234. “We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don’t heal by forming a secret society of one – by assessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.”

— Jeanette Winterson

235. “You said, ‘I’m going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.’ I’ve hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one’s watching. They haven’t faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?”

— Jeanette Winterson

236. “You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.”

— Jeanette Winterson

237. “Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”

— Jeanette Winterson

238. “By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.”

— Jeanette Winterson

239. “Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.”

— Jeanette Winterson

240. “Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.”

— Jeanette Winterson

241. “I guess I’m afraid of not being like other people. No, that’s not true. I’m not afraid of not being like other people. I’m afraid I won’t find anybody who doesn’t mind me not being like other people. I’m not ambitious for money or power. I want to find some real way to live.”

— Jeanette Winterson

242. “Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.”

— Jeanette Winterson

243. “Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off.”

— Jeanette Winterson

244. “The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.”

— Jeanette Winterson

245. “Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.”

— Jeanette Winterson

246. “There’s something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.”

— Jeanette Winterson

247. “I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.”

— Jeanette Winterson

248. “Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?”

— Jeanette Winterson

249. “Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.”

— Jeanette Winterson

250. “When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.”

— Jeanette Winterson