JEANETTE WINTERSON QUOTES II
|
|
I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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, Sexing the Cherry
When people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2008
I'm never tempted by God but I like his trappings.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void... For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Sexing the Cherry
Language ... isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
Only the impossible is worth the effort.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Powerbook
The free man never thinks of escape.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
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, Gut Symmetries
Art ... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Art Objects
What you risk reveals what you value.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me. He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Sexing the Cherry
Passion is not well bred.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
It was actually books that started to make those pockets of freedom, which I hadn’t otherwise experienced. I do see them as talismans, as sacred objects. I see them as something that will protect me, I suppose, that will save me from things that I feel are threatening. I still think that; it doesn’t change. It doesn’t change, having money, being successful. So from the very first, if I was hurt in some way, then I would take a book -- which was very difficult for me to buy when I was little -- and I would go up into the hills, and that is how I would assuage my hurt.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Paris Review, winter 1997
The end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Powerbook
Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
Language is what stops the heart exploding.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2008
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots...but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Lighthousekeeping
|
|
|
