Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.”

— Jeanette Winterson

352. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

354. “It’s only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it – creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

356. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

358. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

362. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

364. “I never cared about money.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

366. “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

367. “If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

372. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

374. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

377. “My passion for her showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.”

— Jeanette Winterson

378. “Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it’s not arrogant.”

— Jeanette Winterson

379. “Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

381. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

383. “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

384. “It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.”

— Jeanette Winterson

385. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

387. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

389. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

391. “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

392. “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

393. “Passion is not well bred.”

— Jeanette Winterson

394. “Life gives you enough hard knocks so it’s unlikely you’ll stay that sure of yourself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

395. “I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.”

— Jeanette Winterson

396. “I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.”

— Jeanette Winterson

397. “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

398. “You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive.”

— Jeanette Winterson

399. “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

400. “The point about food is that a lot of it used to be left-overs and recycling.”

— Jeanette Winterson