Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.”

— Jeanette Winterson

252. “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

253. “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

254. “Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.”

— Jeanette Winterson

255. “It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.”

— Jeanette Winterson

256. “Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.”

— Jeanette Winterson

257. “What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?”

— Jeanette Winterson

258. “I think we are worlds compressed into human form.”

— Jeanette Winterson

259. “It seems to me that being the right size for your world – and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions – is a valuable clue to learning how to live.”

— Jeanette Winterson

260. “A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros.”

— Jeanette Winterson

261. “My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.”

— Jeanette Winterson

262. “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.”

— Jeanette Winterson

263. “The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.”

— Jeanette Winterson

264. “Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.”

— Jeanette Winterson

265. “I have music. Music is the world inside me. I am a performer, but whether or not I perform, the music is there.”

— Jeanette Winterson

266. “What’s invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.”

— Jeanette Winterson

267. “I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.”

— Jeanette Winterson

268. “Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.”

— Jeanette Winterson

269. “Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?”

— Jeanette Winterson

270. “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

271. “We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.”

— Jeanette Winterson

272. “The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.”

— Jeanette Winterson

273. “I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.”

— Jeanette Winterson

274. “Love’s lengthways splits the heart in two – the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.”

— Jeanette Winterson

275. “I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.”

— Jeanette Winterson

276. “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.”

— Jeanette Winterson

277. “It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.”

— Jeanette Winterson

278. “Going mad is the beginning of a process, it’s not meant to be the end result.”

— Jeanette Winterson

279. “Stories are always true... it’s the facts that mislead.”

— Jeanette Winterson

280. “To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.”

— Jeanette Winterson

281. “I’m a woman. And I’m a man. That’s how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn’t do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

282. “It is necessary to distinguish the chalk circle from the stone wall.”

— Jeanette Winterson

283. “You can change everything about yourself – your name, your home, your skin color, your gender, even your parents, your private history – but you can’t change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.”

— Jeanette Winterson

284. “As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.”

— Jeanette Winterson

285. “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

286. “To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

287. “When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.”

— Jeanette Winterson

288. “I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

— Jeanette Winterson

289. “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.”

— Jeanette Winterson

290. “Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.”

— Jeanette Winterson

291. “Where you are born – what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own – stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.”

— Jeanette Winterson

292. “Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.”

— Jeanette Winterson

293. “Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.”

— Jeanette Winterson

294. “There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.”

— Jeanette Winterson

295. “Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.”

— Jeanette Winterson

296. “There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.”

— Jeanette Winterson

297. “In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.”

— Jeanette Winterson

298. “Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what’s in it until it’s too late!”

— Jeanette Winterson

299. “I love the natural world and I never ceased to see it. The beauty of the trees and fields, of hills and streams, of the changing colours, of the small creatures so busy and occupied. My long hours walking or sitting in the field with my back against the wall, watching the clouds and the weather, allowed me some steadiness. It was because I knew all this would be there when I was not that I thought I could go. The world was beautiful. I was as speck in it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

300. “We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.”

— Jeanette Winterson