Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Life gives you enough hard knocks so it’s unlikely you’ll stay that sure of yourself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

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

— Jeanette Winterson

404. “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

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

— Jeanette Winterson

406. “I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.”

— Jeanette Winterson

407. “There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what’s dead. It won’t complain.”

— Jeanette Winterson

408. “The free man never thinks of escape.”

— Jeanette Winterson

409. “One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you’re not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?”

— Jeanette Winterson

410. “There was an ending – there always is – but the story went on past the ending – it always does.”

— Jeanette Winterson

411. “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

412. “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

413. “The past is magnetic. It draws us in.”

— Jeanette Winterson

414. “The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable...”

— Jeanette Winterson

415. “I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

416. “I don’t read reviews because by then it’s too late – whatever anyone says, the book won’t change. It is written.”

— Jeanette Winterson

417. “I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature – as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving.”

— Jeanette Winterson

418. “I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.”

— Jeanette Winterson

419. “I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.”

— Jeanette Winterson

420. “For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.”

— Jeanette Winterson

421. “I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.”

— Jeanette Winterson

422. “Life was a pre-death experience.”

— Jeanette Winterson

423. “The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.”

— Jeanette Winterson

424. “One just spends as much money as one has. Very peculiar that! You never actually have any money. You think, If I had this much money ten years ago, I would have thought I was amazingly rich, but I still manage to spend it all and not have any left.”

— Jeanette Winterson

425. “Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.”

— Jeanette Winterson

426. “We’re living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they’re eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.”

— Jeanette Winterson

427. “We always think the thing we need to transform everything – the miracle – is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.”

— Jeanette Winterson

428. “I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.”

— Jeanette Winterson

429. “Their throats were bare for God.”

— Jeanette Winterson

430. “Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

431. “Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.”

— Jeanette Winterson

432. “No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.”

— Jeanette Winterson

433. “First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.”

— Jeanette Winterson

434. “It doesn’t have to be like that but mostly it is.”

— Jeanette Winterson

435. “When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”

— Jeanette Winterson

436. “I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves.”

— Jeanette Winterson

437. “We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.”

— Jeanette Winterson

438. “It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.”

— Jeanette Winterson

439. “I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first.”

— Jeanette Winterson

440. “If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.”

— Jeanette Winterson

441. “You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved.”

— Jeanette Winterson

442. “Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.”

— Jeanette Winterson

443. “I’ve lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.”

— Jeanette Winterson

444. “The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.”

— Jeanette Winterson

445. “She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.”

— Jeanette Winterson

446. “What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?”

— Jeanette Winterson

447. “How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?”

— Jeanette Winterson

448. “I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively.”

— Jeanette Winterson

449. “I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.”

— Jeanette Winterson

450. “I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. Just on the other side of creativity is the nuthouse – and I often notice people looking at me strangely when I am talking out loud, but there is no other way.”

— Jeanette Winterson