110+ Jeanette Winterson Quotes On Imaginative, Emotive And Quirky

Jeanette Winterson is a British novelist, playwright and journalist. She is best known for her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel. Her other works include The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body and The Stone Gods. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jeanette Winterson on love, imaginative, emotive.

Top 10 Jeanette Winterson Quotes

1. I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
2. 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.
3. I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
4. I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.
5. Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
6. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
7. I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.
8. Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.
9. The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.
10. I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.

Jeanette Winterson Short Quotes

• This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
• To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
• I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.
• The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
• It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.
• What you risk reveals what you value.
• I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.
• Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
• Life is so simple when you're just doing your job.
• I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Love

A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it? — Jeanette Winterson

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

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

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me. — Jeanette Winterson

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

You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. — Jeanette Winterson

Why is the measure of love loss? — Jeanette Winterson

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. — Jeanette Winterson

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value. — Jeanette Winterson

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience. — Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Imaginative

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination. — Jeanette Winterson

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close. — Jeanette Winterson

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? — Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Emotive

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. — Jeanette Winterson

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey. — Jeanette Winterson

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt. — Jeanette Winterson

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead. — Jeanette Winterson

No emotion is the final one. — Jeanette Winterson

It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is. — Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Dark

But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that. — Jeanette Winterson

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. — Jeanette Winterson

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels. — Jeanette Winterson

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. — Jeanette Winterson

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.' — Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Quotes About True

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. — Jeanette Winterson

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? — Jeanette Winterson

Do it from the heart or not at all. — Jeanette Winterson

..to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil. — Jeanette Winterson

It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed? — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it. — Jeanette Winterson

I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many. — Jeanette Winterson

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction--don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end. — Jeanette Winterson

Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one — Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Fate

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. — Jeanette Winterson

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate. — Jeanette Winterson

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable. — Jeanette Winterson

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. — Jeanette Winterson

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose. — Jeanette Winterson

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice. — Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Quotes About Ways

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books. — Jeanette Winterson

We're in a strange situation where people either don't read at all or they read a lot. There's a huge gap in between. That's something that would be good to bridge so it doesn't have to be one thing or the other. Books could be part of life in a more relaxed way. I'd like to see that. — Jeanette Winterson

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out. — Jeanette Winterson

We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated. — Jeanette Winterson

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to. — Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Famous Quotes And Sayings

Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour. — Jeanette Winterson

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

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

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms. — Jeanette Winterson

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. — Jeanette Winterson

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

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

Tell me the story, Pew. . . . It was a woman. You always say that. There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good. Is that the complete list? Then there is the woman you love. Who's she? That's another story. — Jeanette Winterson

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil. Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it. — Jeanette Winterson

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

Happy ending are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future. — Jeanette Winterson

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now. — Jeanette Winterson

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, I fuck therefore I am. — Jeanette Winterson

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

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

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. — Jeanette Winterson

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world. — Jeanette Winterson

It’s better to think of my life like that— part miracle, part madness. It’s better if I accept that I can’t control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

Naked is the best disguise. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. — Jeanette Winterson

unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. — Jeanette Winterson

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. — Jeanette Winterson

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy. — Jeanette Winterson

I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me. — Jeanette Winterson

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously. — Jeanette Winterson

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life. — Jeanette Winterson

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct. — Jeanette Winterson

It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off. — Jeanette Winterson

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other. — Jeanette Winterson

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. — Jeanette Winterson

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement. — Jeanette Winterson

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. — Jeanette Winterson

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life. — Jeanette Winterson

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks. — Jeanette Winterson

I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl. — Jeanette Winterson

Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing. — Jeanette Winterson

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance. — Jeanette Winterson

Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don't give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it. — Jeanette Winterson

The crazy thing is that when we go to somebody's house, what's better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody's ever going to say, "Can I see the index to your Kindle?" It's so depressing and so unsexy. Sure, it's there, but nobody is going to get excited by that. — Jeanette Winterson

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older. — Jeanette Winterson

I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder. Theyall want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That's not the kind of heroism they enjoy. — Jeanette Winterson

If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war. — Jeanette Winterson

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love. — Jeanette Winterson

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world. — Jeanette Winterson

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language. — Jeanette Winterson

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie. — Jeanette Winterson

I know I've had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn't matter if I couldn't make it speak to other people. — Jeanette Winterson

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. — Jeanette Winterson

Reading is where the wild things are. — Jeanette Winterson

Great control and great discipline are necessary when you reach your own editing stage of the book, but in the early stages you have to be prepared to let anything happen and to get it wrong or go off track. The development of a character is not smooth or simple - it is as tricky as meeting someone new whom you would like to know better. — Jeanette Winterson

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion. — Jeanette Winterson

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break. — Jeanette Winterson

There's a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn't seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books are activities that you do after-hours, rather than things that are at the heart of life. That's a huge change. — Jeanette Winterson

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival. — Jeanette Winterson

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone. — Jeanette Winterson

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? — Jeanette Winterson

I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving. — Jeanette Winterson

Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited. — Jeanette Winterson

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's. — Jeanette Winterson

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it. — Jeanette Winterson

Language is a finding place, not a hiding place. — Jeanette Winterson

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. — Jeanette Winterson

As your lover describes you, so you are. — Jeanette Winterson

Life Lessons by Jeanette Winterson

1. Jeanette Winterson teaches us to be brave and to stand up for what we believe in, no matter how difficult it may be.
2. She encourages us to be open to new ideas and to be curious about the world around us.
3. She reminds us that it is important to be kind to ourselves and to others, and to never give up on our dreams.