Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Readings not a luxury, arts not a luxury. Its about your soul, and its about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren’t going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.

The wider we read the freer we become.

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

The free man never thinks of escape.

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from Why books seem shockproof against change. THE TIMES: BOOKS)

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. Theres no choice that doesnt mean a loss.

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays

Theres no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that.Theres no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you.Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and Im not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldnt love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

Explore me, you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.