Jeanette Winterson quotes - page 7

I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue? (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? View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
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. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. the world just pours it out. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Bask in it. In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion. (Jeanette Winterson)
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you? View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The Sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
No second chances at a single moment. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything– the miracle– is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
She thought of an article she had once seen on mind control. Apparently if there was a person fiendish enough to set about interfering with your life, the only thing you could do was to concentrate hard on someone they were unlikely ever to have heard of called Martin Amis. The particular blankness of this image was guaranteed to protect from any subtle force, but Gloria realised with a sinking heart that it was too late now. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I felt as if I had blundered into someone else's life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
I am a glass man, but there is no light in me that can shine across the sea. I shall lead no one home, save no lives, not even my own. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the worlds tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves. (Jeanette Winterson)
Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a café, years ago. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate. View quote
Jeanette Winterson
In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now. View quote
Jeanette Winterson