Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

360. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

382. “I never cared about money.”

— Jeanette Winterson

383. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

394. “Passion is not well bred.”

— Jeanette Winterson

395. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

399. “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

400. “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