However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so...
JEANETTE WINTERSON In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.
JEANETTE WINTERSON I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
JEANETTE WINTERSON What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, t...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is tru...
JEANETTE WINTERSON It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON What you risk reveals what you value.
JEANETTE WINTERSON To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
JEANETTE WINTERSON She was a monster, but she was my monster.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.
JEANETTE WINTERSON The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON There was a man here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven n...
JEANETTE WINTERSON What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking...
JEANETTE WINTERSON the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is f...
JEANETTE WINTERSON It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.
JEANETTE WINTERSON We are friends and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I woul...
JEANETTE WINTERSON It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be wort...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, see...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you...
JEANETTE WINTERSON You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.
JEANETTE WINTERSON This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
JEANETTE WINTERSON I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Breathe in, breath out. Oxygen is carcinogenic and likely puts a limit on our life span. It would be...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.
JEANETTE WINTERSON The free man never thinks of escape.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together....
JEANETTE WINTERSON I don't want the Thatcher years back, but I don't want the Brown-Prescott years either. I am prepare...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'
Was s...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams an...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame hea...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Pursuing happiness, and I did, and still do, is not at all the same as being happy- which I think is...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've work...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You...
JEANETTE WINTERSON But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss t...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is f...
JEANETTE WINTERSON To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the g...
JEANETTE WINTERSON As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting,...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy--which I think ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is t...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silen...
JEANETTE WINTERSON A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.
JEANETTE WINTERSON I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, med...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness whe...
JEANETTE WINTERSON This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped him...
JEANETTE WINTERSON You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't kno...
JEANETTE WINTERSON They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, n...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measu...
JEANETTE WINTERSON If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear b...
JEANETTE WINTERSON When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where yo...
JEANETTE WINTERSON What is luck', he said, 'but the ability to exploit accidents?
JEANETTE WINTERSON There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
JEANETTE WINTERSON There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that.

There's no effort which...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Look at all that rubbish," she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the te...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart...
JEANETTE WINTERSON When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.
JEANETTE WINTERSON When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mat...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history ma...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority - of a ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or tha...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.
JEANETTE WINTERSON In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they could...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we...
JEANETTE WINTERSON With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present...
JEANETTE WINTERSON ...what he told himself on those sea-soaked nights...Others joined in and it was discovered that eve...
JEANETTE WINTERSON You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

I said I was afraid of not living.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I d...
JEANETTE WINTERSON You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Q: How do you fall in love?

You don't fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.
JEANETTE WINTERSON 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 Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of con...
JEANETTE WINTERSON My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.
JEANETTE WINTERSON One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.
JEANETTE WINTERSON I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.
JEANETTE WINTERSON What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.
JEANETTE WINTERSON I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Naked is the best disguise.
JEANETTE WINTERSON I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
JEANETTE WINTERSON My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
JEANETTE WINTERSON do it from the heart or not at all.
JEANETTE WINTERSON It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is her...
JEANETTE WINTERSON When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up m...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I'm not a quitter.
JEANETTE WINTERSON The wider we read the freer we become.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a sp...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Don't you think it's strange that life, described
as so rich and full, a camel-trail of advent...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...
History is a collection of found objects washed up ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like...
JEANETTE WINTERSON It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
JEANETTE WINTERSON If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones an...
JEANETTE WINTERSON You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take i...
JEANETTE WINTERSON our outside loo, known as the Betty, was a good loo; whitewashed and compact with a flashlight hangi...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without pa...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differentl...
JEANETTE WINTERSON It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took yo...
JEANETTE WINTERSON History is a madman's museum.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Life…we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting ol...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close...
JEANETTE WINTERSON For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate peopl...
JEANETTE WINTERSON True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thi...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON There are two questions: where have you come from, and where are you going? But the brain doesn't ha...
JEANETTE WINTERSON moss that is concentrating on being green.
JEANETTE WINTERSON There’s a planet,’ said Spike, ‘made of water, entirely of water, where every solid thing is i...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Women are just planets that attract the wrong species.
JEANETTE WINTERSON She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is t...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I kissed her and forgot death.
JEANETTE WINTERSON There’s a planet called Echo. It doesn’t exist. It’s like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guaran...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. I...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.' JEANETTE WINTERSON Human beings often display emotions they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not displ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it?” (205)
JEANETTE WINTERSON Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.
JEANETTE WINTERSON I looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself.
I was up to my chin when the sho...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Loneliness isn’t about being by yourself. That’s fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. L...
JEANETTE WINTERSON …only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy,...
JEANETTE WINTERSON The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristi...
JEANETTE WINTERSON For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate peopl...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Wallowing is sex for depressives.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.
JEANETTE WINTERSON I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death,...
JEANETTE WINTERSON She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted c...
JEANETTE WINTERSON To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to l...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those thi...
JEANETTE WINTERSON My mother was in charge of language. My father had never really learned to read - he could manage sl...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that h...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the...
JEANETTE WINTERSON To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her,
or if not I, the i...
JEANETTE WINTERSON I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written som...
JEANETTE WINTERSON Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.
JEANETTE WINTERSON But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.
JEANETTE WINTERSON Often the greatest progress happen in the most difficult of times.
JEANETTE CORON A circle of women may just be the most powerful force known to humanity. If you have one, embrace it...
JEANETTE LEBLANC Be gentle. Pay attention. Offer purposeful healing. Seek Equilibrium. Unfreeze, slowly. Stretch your...
JEANETTE LEBLANC We are here to love hard and true. Here to give ourselves over to the rush and bliss of it all. Here...
JEANETTE LEBLANC To know the hope and the struggle and the stay still and the run away and the come here and the push...
JEANETTE LEBLANC I have no inhibitions about smoking or drinking, but I think too much of my voice to place it in jeo...
JEANETTE MACDONALD Do not try quiet my voice.
Do not attempt to soften my edges or tame my prowl.
I am inhabi...
JEANETTE LEBLANC Humans can learn to like anything, that's why we are such a successful species. You can drop humans ...
JEANETTE DESOR Butterflies are beautiful, but the process of emerging from the chrysalis and spreading your wings c...
JEANETTE LEBLANC Been painting ceramics for years, I love it. I am waiting until I finish this project so that I can ...
JEANETTE BROWN It's like raping Alice in Wonderland.
JEANETTE WILLIAMS If you stop being afraid of the word no and take more chances, you will get more yes.
JEANETTE CORON I'm sure that people must say about me, on the screen, 'Good gracious, is Jeanette MacDonald...
JEANETTE MACDONALD You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. There are no bystanders who get to clai...
JEANETTE LEBLANC The one thing I missed was never having children. It just wasn't in the cards, I guess.
JEANETTE MACDONALD I must have had rocks in my head.
JEANETTE MACDONALD I'm sure that people must say about me, on the screen, 'Good gracious, is Jeanette MacDonald going t...
JEANETTE MACDONALD I can't believe how blessed I am! I'm married to the most wonderful man, Gene Raymond, whom I'm deep...
JEANETTE MACDONALD I've been told I have an Irish temper, I know I have Scottish thrift, and, like the English, I love ...
JEANETTE MACDONALD You realize, monsieur, that I am not in love with you, that I have no intention of falling in love w...
JEANETTE MACDONALD & Whenn i Scratch my Nailss Down hisss baqqqq ; yourrr gonnahhh feel it.
JEANETTE R. Because like the depths of the ocean that calls you home, you will never be easy.

But dar...
JEANETTE LEBLANC It can be said that we are built by many things. Biology and lineage. Grit and moonlight and ocean s...
JEANETTE LEBLANC