For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.

Jeanette Winterson

Categorized in : Giving Language Emotion

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

Jeanette Winterson

differences art thinking

If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.

Jeanette Winterson

should heart water

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

Jeanette Winterson

hurt memories moving

It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.

Jeanette Winterson

second-chance moments remember

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

Jeanette Winterson

saws mirrors firsts

Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.

Jeanette Winterson

break-out glasses expression

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

Jeanette Winterson

values risk discovery

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't 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.

Jeanette Winterson

blow talking children

You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

Jeanette Winterson

pain pregnancy love

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

Jeanette Winterson

pieces cutting

While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Jeanette Winterson

dream morning love

I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.

Jeanette Winterson

future love mean

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.

Jeanette Winterson

pulse hands world

I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

Jeanette Winterson

another-chance leaving years

Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

Jeanette Winterson

falling-in-love dog book

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.

Jeanette Winterson

rocks love-you long

I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

Jeanette Winterson

strong forever love-is

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

Jeanette Winterson

land sea love-is

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

Jeanette Winterson

breakdown inspirational world

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

Jeanette Winterson

home doors book