Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “If I can’t stay where I am, and I can’t, then I will put all that I can into the going.”

— Jeanette Winterson

352. “If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.”

— Jeanette Winterson

353. “She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice.”

— Jeanette Winterson

354. “Slightest accidents open up new worlds.”

— Jeanette Winterson

355. “What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?”

— Jeanette Winterson

356. “I don’t write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.”

— Jeanette Winterson

357. “When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary.”

— Jeanette Winterson

358. “Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.”

— Jeanette Winterson

359. “There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn’t felt that.”

— Jeanette Winterson

360. “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.”

— Jeanette Winterson

361. “I like to see the people arriving. I like to imagine their lives. It keeps me from thinking too much about my own. A man shouldn’t be too introspective. It weakens him. That is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I’m a Hemingway man myself although I don’t believe it is right to hunt lions.”

— Jeanette Winterson

362. “It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.”

— Jeanette Winterson

363. “I don’t want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

364. “Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.”

— Jeanette Winterson

365. “Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn’t matter to me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

366. “What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.”

— Jeanette Winterson

367. “Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos- and it’s pain.”

— Jeanette Winterson

368. “All I am saying is that love is not exclusively human.”

— Jeanette Winterson

369. “It is silence that most needs an answering – when I can no longer speak, hear me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

370. “When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming.”

— Jeanette Winterson

371. “I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.”

— Jeanette Winterson

372. “And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn’t poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.”

— Jeanette Winterson

373. “I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed.”

— Jeanette Winterson

374. “London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.”

— Jeanette Winterson

375. “Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.”

— Jeanette Winterson

376. “As a writer, if you’re prepared to work from your own wound, you’re allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

377. “Seeing one’s books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.”

— Jeanette Winterson

378. “Humans will be like decayed gentry. We’ll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We’ll have a piece of land that we didn’t look after very well called the planet. And we’ll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We’ll be fading aristocracy. We’ll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We’ll be Marie Antionette with no cake.”

— Jeanette Winterson

379. “I think therefore I am. Does that mean ‘I feel therefore I’m not’? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.”

— Jeanette Winterson

380. “Passion is for holidays, not homecoming.”

— Jeanette Winterson

381. “I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn’t matter at all.”

— Jeanette Winterson

382. “I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.”

— Jeanette Winterson

383. “There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss.”

— Jeanette Winterson

384. “Each book is a different staging post on the writer’s journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer’s relationship to it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

385. “I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What’s the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.”

— Jeanette Winterson

386. “Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.”

— Jeanette Winterson

387. “Babies are frightening – raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body.”

— Jeanette Winterson

388. “I never cared about money.”

— Jeanette Winterson

389. “I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.”

— Jeanette Winterson

390. “What if?’ has no power against ‘What if not?’ The not of you is unbearable. I must have you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

391. “I don’t see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.”

— Jeanette Winterson

392. “It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.”

— Jeanette Winterson

393. “Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.”

— Jeanette Winterson

394. “I’m always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

395. “Ne sachant quoi lire ni dans quel ordre, j’ai suivi l’alphabet. Dieu merci, elle s’appelait Austen...”

— Jeanette Winterson

396. “Confidence and superiority: It’s the usual fundamentalist stuff: I’ve got the truth, and you haven’t.”

— Jeanette Winterson

397. “If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

398. “In the sky, Planet Moon is 239,000 miles away. That’s not far when you remember that the sun is 93 million miles away.”

— Jeanette Winterson

399. “Passion is not well bred.”

— Jeanette Winterson

400. “I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn’t I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.”

— Jeanette Winterson