Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment youve lost forever. There is only now.

Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.

You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of loves nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through loves fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

Passion out of passions obstacles.

No. Take the heart first. Then you dont feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, theres no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. Its the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. Its the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. Its the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

She knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didnt go out to work.

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.Jordan...I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You dont have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.

Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?