Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

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

— Jeanette Winterson

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

256. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

258. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

260. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

263. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

265. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

278. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

285. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

290. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

296. “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

297. “The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.”

— Jeanette Winterson

298. “What’s the big deal? Snow’s just rain that’s been left out in the cold.”

— Jeanette Winterson

299. “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”’ That’s from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.”

— Jeanette Winterson

300. “As your lover describes you, so you are.”

— Jeanette Winterson