History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. Jeanette Winterson More Quotes by Jeanette Winterson More Quotes From Jeanette Winterson The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin. Jeanette Winterson uselaughingbook More than sex. More than money. You know, life is not endless is it? Cash, cars, cocaine, and girls. It's more than that. And there is a spiritual dimension to people...we are driven to want something more. Jeanette Winterson girlspiritualsex The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees. Jeanette Winterson motherboyssex The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something. Jeanette Winterson spiritualityworshipimpossible I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It's rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don't stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end. Jeanette Winterson cuttingwritingthinking The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me? Jeanette Winterson riverspeoplethinking The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I. Jeanette Winterson inwardbodybelief I think we are worlds compressed into human form. Jeanette Winterson formworldthinking Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl. Jeanette Winterson carbonadvantagegirl At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom. Jeanette Winterson starsmoonbook The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform. Jeanette Winterson satisfiedpoet Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love. Jeanette Winterson risinglove-isideas The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Jeanette Winterson paindream To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language. Jeanette Winterson would-bepastneeds Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth. Jeanette Winterson shapesdreambelieve Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort. Jeanette Winterson jobsbookart Reading is where the wild things are. Jeanette Winterson wild-thingsreading I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex. Jeanette Winterson motherbooksex It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. Jeanette Winterson causesemotionexpression Writing objects to the lie that life is small. Writing is a cell of energy. Writing defines itself. Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant. Writing exhibits boldness. Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us. Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life. Jeanette Winterson cellswritinglying
