Jeanette Winterson

“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?”

“the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.”

“I have flown the distance of your body from side to side of your ivory coast. I know the forests where I can rest and feed. I have mapped you with my naked eye and stored you out of sight. The millions of cells that make up your tissues are plotted on my retina. Night flying I know exactly where I am. Your body is my landing strip.”

“True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are. A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don't want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?”

“I told my version – faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as hero like any shipwreck story. It was a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not altogether human, and rarely kind. And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it. I am often asked, in a tick-box kind of way, what is 'true' and what is not 'true' in Oranges. Did I work in a funeral parlour? Did I drive an ice-cream van? Did we have a Gospel Tent? Did Mrs. Winterson build her own CB radio? Did she really stun tomcats with a catapult? I can't answer these questions. I can say that there is a character in Oranges called Testifying Elsie who looks after the little Jeanette and acts as a soft wall against the hurt(ling) force of Mother. I wrote her in because I couldn't bear to leave her out. I wrote her in because I really wished it had been that way. When you are a solitary child you find an imaginary friend. There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that.”

“I am an ambitious writer – I don’t see the point of being anything, no, not anything at all, if you have no ambition for it.”

“I had thought about everything carefully before I had agreed to him. I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated; his heart and mine.”

“At college, I was told there were four great women novelists in the 19th century – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Not one of them led an enviable life – all of them had to sacrifice ludicrously in order to be writers. I wasn't prepared to do that.You could become ill so that you could retreat to the bedroom, avoid your domestic responsibilities and write like Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. You had to forget about writing if you weren't prepared to sacrifice any other things you might want from life, like kids or lovers. It's not like that now.”

“I was in those days all about the 'fuck you'. Fuck you for not recognising how great I am. I'll do it myself.”

“What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?”

“By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.”

“If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.”

“Now if I was aping men, she'd have every right to be disgusted. As far as I was concerned, men were something you had around the place...not particularly interesting, but quite harmless.”

“When my mother heard about this, she was furious, and she crossed Nellie off her prayer list. My dad put her on his instead, so she didn't miss out.”

“I love her.""Then you do not love the Lord.""Yes, I love both of them.""You cannot." "I do.”

“People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that?”

“What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favorite aunt in our favorite poker parlor) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favorite poker in our favorite aunt). I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris's front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs. Virtue's sewing class. Mrs. Virtue should either have had the imagination to commend me for my effort in context, or the farsightedness to realize there is a debate going on as to whether something has an absolute as well as a relative value; given that, she should have given me the benefit of the doubt.As it was, she got upset and blamed me for her headache.”

“I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?”

“…when the dying sun bled the blue sky orange.”

“I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams.”

“I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.”

“I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.”

“When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. ... So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself.”

“Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.”

“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.”

“It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.”

“You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.”

“I am not a fan of supermarkets and I hate shopping there, even for things I can't get elsewhere, like cat food and bin bags. A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn't just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noise that made room for everyone, money or not.”

“St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.”

“He scarred her arm...but she did not care because she loved him and she knew that love leaves a wound that leaves a scar.”

“Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.”

“Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don't matter a bit.”

“Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.”

“What could I do? My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she’d either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she’d do what most people do when confronted with something they don’t understand: Panic.”

“The pursuit of happiness is more elusive, it is life long and not goal-centered. Whant you are pusuing is meaning - a meaningful life. The fate the draw that is yours and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream thats going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when your realize that being barely alive , on your own terms, is better then living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.The pursuit isn't all or nothing - it's ALL and NOTHING.”

“They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.”

“It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.”

“De ce sunt oare oamenii lasati să crească fără a avea aparatura necesară pentru a lua deciziile morale cele mai sănătoase?”

“What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous”

“And if you have found your voice, you can be heard”

“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.”

“She said she’d often wondered why she wanted to do some things and not do other things at all. Well, it was obvious with some things, but for others, there was no reason there. She’d spent a long time puzzling it out, then she thought that what you’d done in a past life you didn’t need to do again, and what you had to do in the future, you wouldn’t be ready to do now.”

“All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything--the miracle--is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.”

“I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.”

“In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top with the phone saying 'Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine.' The trunks shudder”

“He called me Jess because that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon. I was his falcon. I hung on his arm and fed at his hand. He said my nose was sharp and cruel and that my eyes had madness in them. He said I would tear him to pieces if he dealt softly with me. At night, if he was away, he had me chained to our bed. It was a long chain, long enough for me to use the chamber pot or to stand at the window and wait for the late owls. I love to hear the owls. I love to see the sudden glide of wings spread out for prey, and then the dip and the noise like a lover in pain. He used the chain when we went riding together. I had a horse as strong as his, and he’d whip the horse from behind and send it charging through the trees, and he’d follow, half a head behind, pulling on the chain and asking me how I liked my ride. His game was to have me sit astride him when we made love and hold me tight in the small of my back. He said he had to have me above him, in case I picked his eyes out in the faltering candlelight. I was none of these things, but I became them. At night, in June I think, I flew off his wrist and tore his liver from his body, and bit my chain in pieces and left him on the bed with his eyes open. He looked surprised, I don’t know why. As your lover describes you, so you are.”

“Every new beginning prompts a return.”

“You don't have to get into writing – it's not like a pair of jeans... The only way to write is to write – the rest may or not follow.”

“If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely 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.”

“Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I'll take a chance.”