Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

207. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

209. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Quotes About Stories

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

— Jeanette Winterson

211. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

215. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

216. “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

217. “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

218. “To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

226. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Jeanette Winterson

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things we can’t say, because they are too painful. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

247. “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

248. “I don’t own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don’t want to drown. My head is my heart’s lifebelt.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

250. “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