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As your lover describes you, so you are.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Sexing the Cherry
It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Sexing the Cherry
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2008
If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much in use for it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Art Objects
Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it's not an absence of feeling? I liken it to that particular numbness one gets after a visit to the dentist. Not in pain nor out of it, slightly drugged. Contentment is the positive side of resignation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. The way there is sudden. The way out is worse.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
If there's one thing I can't stand it's a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The World and Other Places
Words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
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, The Paris Review, winter 1997
Passion is for holidays, not homecoming.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Powerbook
In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The World and Other Places
Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
The buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Sexing the Cherry
Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg -- it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Why is the measure of love loss?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
I think I have spoken before about the writer, the artist being a kind of dredging net going down into the rich silt of the mind, of the spirit, to bring up things that are normally out of reach or not accessible to consciousness. It's the duty of the writer -- and indeed of all artists -- to think long and deeply and to be able to drill down into those substrata so that these contents are released. Also, I think that as you drill down there is a release in all of the senses because great pressures build up in people and they don't know why. Quite often something very simple, a way of elucidating it, a way of telling the story, can release that and relieve it and make them feel, Yes, that's what is happening to me, or, This is how I feel. Then immediately one is taken off that horrible little rock of chaos where one is entirely alone and brought back into the community.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Paris Review, winter 1997
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Lighthousekeeping
I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Gut Symmetries
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
Only the impossible is worth the effort.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
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