Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead. Jeanette Winterson More Quotes by Jeanette Winterson More Quotes From Jeanette Winterson 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. Jeanette Winterson nestsmadhair People do go back, but they don't 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 can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. 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. Jeanette Winterson painheartreality In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one. Jeanette Winterson presence-of-lovequests I remember once walking out hand in hand with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we'd be rich forever. We filled our pockets and our hair. We were rolled in gold. We ran through the field laughing and our legs and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or golden gods. He kissed my feet, the boy I was with, and when he smiled, he had a gold tooth. It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young. Jeanette Winterson summerhairboys It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is. Jeanette Winterson Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her? Jeanette Winterson adventurehandsthinking This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in. Jeanette Winterson storieslove-isway We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes. Jeanette Winterson daylightworstlucky What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate. Jeanette Winterson fatechoicesopposites The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. Jeanette Winterson truth-isiceheart 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. Jeanette Winterson wallhomethinking She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world. Jeanette Winterson wide-awakesleepworld In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. Jeanette Winterson heatsunhands August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade. Jeanette Winterson degreesaugustwant We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't. Jeanette Winterson statesbodyremember To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead. Jeanette Winterson emotional 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. Jeanette Winterson suicidetogethertrying I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings. Jeanette Winterson angeldreamwings I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost. Jeanette Winterson lighthealingreality Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say. Jeanette Winterson punditsstampsborn
