Jeanette Winterson quotes - page 5

In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. (Jeanette Winterson)
Only the impossible is worth the effort. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
What to say? That 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. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
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. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain. (Jeanette Winterson)
She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted. View quote
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 tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS) View quote
Jeanette Winterson
You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Going back after a long time will make you made, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I'm telling you stories. Trust me. (Jeanette Winterson)
He doesn't understand I want the freedom to make my own mistakes. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there's no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you'll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone's nightmares come true. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
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. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown. View quote
Jeanette Winterson