Jeanette Winterson Quotes - Page 7

Quotes about:

• What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Stars, Light, Long

  Jeanette Winterson (2010). “Weight”, p.3, Canongate Books

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• Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Running, Light, Views

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• 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

  Ifs, I Can

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• I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Writing, Goes On

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.159, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Heart, Beloved, Hopeless

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• Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Past, Moments, Boundaries

  "Gut Symmetries". Book by Jeanette Winterson, 1997.

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• You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?

  Jeanette Winterson

  Love You, Long, Said

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• There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Emotional, Thinking, Doors

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• In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Home, Phones, Light

  Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

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• Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Stories, Trust Me, I Can

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• When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as a result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tight-rope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Emotional, Decision, Teeth

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• Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Inspirational, Children, Kids

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• I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Thinking, Literature, Private Life

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

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• [Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Reality, Medicine, Imagination

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• In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Space, Another Chance, Shapes

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• When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Kids, Journey, Self

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• That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Powerful, Literature, Language

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• Two hundred miles from the surface of the earth there is no gravity. The laws of motion are suspended. You could turn somersaults slowly slowly, weight into weightlessness, nowhere to fall. As you lay on your back paddling in space you might notice your feet had fled your head. You are stretching slowly slowly, getting longer, your joints are slipping away from their usual places. There is no connection between your shoulder and your arm. You will break up bone by bone, fractured from who you are, drifting away now, the centre cannot hold.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Fall, Law, Two

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• Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mother, Art, Thinking

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• You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Names, World, Arms

  Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Lighthousekeeping”, p.189, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Quests, Presence Of Love

  Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.81, Random House

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• I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Feels

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• What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Fate, Opposites, Choices

  Jeanette Winterson (2010). “Weight”, p.97, Canongate Books

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• He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil. Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Reality, Psychosis, Trying

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• People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Pain, Heart, Reality

  Jeanette Winterson (1985). “Oranges are Not the Only Fruit”

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