Jeanette Winterson quote: "Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body."

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

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
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

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

Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.

Jeanette Winterson

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