Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.”

— Jeanette Winterson

252. “Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.”

— Jeanette Winterson

253. “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

254. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

255. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

260. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

262. “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

263. “It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.”

— Jeanette Winterson

264. “Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things.”

— Jeanette Winterson

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

274. “When we learn to read, it’s a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Jeanette Winterson

282. “I didn’t only want Louise’s flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. I would have held her to me though time had stripped away the tones and textures of her skin. I could have held her for a thousand years until the skeleton itself rubbed away to dust. What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?”

— Jeanette Winterson

283. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

285. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Atlas, Atlas, Atlas. It’s in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas – it means ‘the long suffering one’.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson