There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
One of my personal aims has been to try to bring the word back to people who are dispossessed of it. So when people come along and say, I don't normally read, but somebody gave me one of your books and now I have read all of them, that, for me, is a great victory. Because, of course, they won’t stop with my books; they'll read other people’s too.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Paris Review, winter 1997
Each man kills the thing he loves.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
It is silence that most needs an answering -- when I can no longer speak, hear me.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Powerbook
Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
I am interested in the tension between the built environment and the natural environment and how the two can coexist, given that they have to coexist, and how at the moment our dreams of bliss are a kind of invented Arcadia. Everyone wants to escape to the hills and leave behind the swarming cities, which are disease and crime. Clearly, this is just as crazy as everyone wanting to leave the hills and rush to the cities to get jobs. It's as though people are always uneasy in the place where they are and think that the extreme alternative will provide the solutions.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Paris Review, winter 1997
The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Love is an experiment ... what happens next is always surprising.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I'm really a flight animal.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
One of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal. The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the national identity, all the things that a particular kind of man with a particular kind of power urge adores, these are the things that become important. War gives the lie to the personal, drowns it in meetings, alarms, sacrifices. The personal is only allowed to return as death.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Life is so simple when you're just doing your job.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
This is a quantum universe ... neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
She was a monster, but she was my monster.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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, The Stone Gods
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