Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.Or the people who found Atlantis.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didnt look after him, upset there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they cant grow up. They can get older, but they cant grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you wont hit love in the face.

Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place wont help you.

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. im not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.

Destiny is a worrying concept. I dont want to be fated, I want to choose.

The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

Atlas said, Must my future be so heavy? Hera said, That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed. How can I escape my fate? You must choose your destiny.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.

What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.

Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?

I think therefore I am. Does that mean I feel therefore Im not? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.