Jeanette Winterson

Novelist

1959-08-27

Books by Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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Written on the Body
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.
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The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
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Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
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Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.
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He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.
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Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.
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And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.
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The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.Or the people who found Atlantis.
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Examine this statement: —A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
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Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.
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Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.
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Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
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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. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.
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Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.
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Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.
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When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.Jordan...I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.
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The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it's the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.
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She knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work.
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Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.
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Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
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