Jeanette Winterson
Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.Collection: Wall
Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.Collection: Heart
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?Collection: Thinking
the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.Collection: Book
A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros.Collection: Homosexual
What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.Collection: Sex
Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?Collection: Thinking
Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.Collection: Creativity
In therapy , the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.Collection: Scary
You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.Collection: Revenge
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.Collection: Book
Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.Collection: People
After every ''victory'' you have more enemies.Collection: Peace
As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience.Collection: New Experiences
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.Collection: Lying
The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.Collection: Art
Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Strong
I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.Collection: Accused
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.Collection: Past
When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.Collection: Drawing
If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.Collection: Heart
The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.Collection: Numbness
Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.Collection: Believe
Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.Collection: Cheating
The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's 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.Collection: Love You
As your lover describes you, so you are.Collection: Lovers
Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.Collection: Love Is
If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.Collection: Art
Life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It's not really random at all.Collection: Creativity
History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.Collection: Suicide
I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.Collection: Moving
One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.Collection: Years
Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.Collection: Art
Language is what stops the heart exploding.Collection: Heart
What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.Collection: Thinking
When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.Collection: Regret
When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.Collection: Space
For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots...but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.Collection: Cutting
We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.Collection: Doe
Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness.Collection: Tragedy
There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.Collection: Dream
Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every oneCollection: Wish
Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.Collection: Writing
Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.Collection: Nature
The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.Collection: Inward
As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.Collection: Men
The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform.Collection: Poet
Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.Collection: Girl