Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now, my mind repeating Schrodingers Cat, Schrodingers Cat.

Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My fathers decay lodged in me.

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

Women always bring it back to the personal, said Handsome. Its why you cant be world leaders.And men never do, I said, which is why we end up with no world left to lead.

They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.Feeling is frightening.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isnt. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we dont leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.

Going back after a long time will make you mad, 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.

If I cant stay where I am, and I cant, then I will put all that I can into the going.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some peoples emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.

Theres a chance that Im not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didnt make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have been confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.

People do go back, but they dont survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here.

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture

the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.

I looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself.I was up to my chin when the shout came, and I will never forget it. Never. For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering — when I can no longer speak, hear me.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.