Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we dont really have any choice.

The true nature of the world is energy not mass.

If you think about something for long enough, she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen. She tapped her head. `Its all in the mind.

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.

Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said 27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS.It might as well have said 27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON.

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether it’s solutions to those extra pounds you’re carrying, or to your thinning hair, or to your loss of appetite, loss of love. We are always looking for solutions, but actually what we are engaged in is a process throughout life during which you never get it right. You have to keep being open, you have to keep moving forward. You have to keep finding out who you are and how you are changing, and only that makes life tolerable.

There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody elses.

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didnt get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. Ive never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, Id want to feel the stars round my head. Id want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. Id want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. Thats how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.

A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.

I wasnt getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didnt want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, its the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. Its like reading a book with the first few pages missing. Its like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it cant, and it shouldnt, because something IS missing. That isnt of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.

Look at all that rubbish, she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all.Theyre taking it away, I said. Where to? she said. It just gets moved around dearie, thats all.

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.