Jeanette Winterson
I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first.Collection: Space
Passion is for holidays, not homecoming.Collection: Passion
Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.Collection: Marriage
Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.Collection: Reading
One just spends as much money as one has. Very peculiar that! You never actually have any money. You think, If I had this much money ten years ago, I would have thought I was amazingly rich, but I still manage to spend it all and not have any left.Collection: Money
One of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal. The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the national identity, all the things that a particular kind of man with a particular kind of power urge adores, these are the things that become important. War gives the lie to the personal, drowns it in meetings, alarms, sacrifices. The personal is only allowed to return as death.Collection: Lying
Life is so simple when you're just doing your job.Collection: Jobs
Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.Collection: Fall
Trust me, I’m telling you stories.Collection: Stories
Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can’t be logical about.Collection: Firsts
There are only three possible endings -aren’t there? – to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.Collection: Stories
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.Collection: Stories
We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that’s true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.Collection: Stories
There’s something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.Collection: Stories
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.Collection: Reading
For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.Collection: Reading