Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Dog, Falling In Love, Book

• Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Home, Doors

• Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Fate, Addiction

  Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery”, p.80, Random House

• If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Change, Crush, Book

  "Redemption songs" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

• I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Believe, Book, Long

• I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Believe, Book, Communication

• Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mother, Book, Fall

  Jeanette Winterson (2011). “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”, p.36, Random House

• 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

  Book, Doors, Magic

• Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Reading, Book, Eye

  Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.89, Random House

• In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Journey, Emotional

• I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Writing, Left

• Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Reading, Doors

• Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Broken, Begin Again

• Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Writing, Strangers And Friends

• And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Believe, Book, Taken

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.95, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mother, Book, Too Late

• I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Cat, Garden

• Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Love, Book, World

• The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Baby, Book, Reading

  "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?". Book by Jeanette Winterson, www.abc.net.au. 2011.

• I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Home, Rereading

• Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Art, Jobs, Book

• 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

  Book, Journey, Different

• We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Meaningful, Book, Kids

  Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

• 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

  Mother, Sex, Book

  Jeanette Winterson (2011). “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”, p.38, Random House

• We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Book, Fall, Lasts

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