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.
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.
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.
It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.
I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.
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?
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.
I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.
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.
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.
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what’s dead. It won’t complain.
A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they’re doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.
I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
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.
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.
Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job.
It’s a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.
St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.
And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.
It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.
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.
Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff
Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.
Reading’s not a luxury, art’s not a luxury. It’s about your soul, and it’s about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury
The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.
I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.
I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.
I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Part broken – part whole, you begin again. ( from ‘Why books seem shockproof against change.’ THE TIMES: BOOKS)
For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.
…love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down
I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss.
You are a pool of clear water where the light plays
The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.
History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.
Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.
your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught.
To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you’ve lost forever. There is only now.
Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.
Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?
She knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn’t go out to work.
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.
Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.
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.
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.
Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.
It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.
The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i’m not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.
Destiny is a worrying concept. I don’t want to be fated, I want to choose.
Atlas said, ‘Must my future be so heavy?’ Hera said, ‘That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.’ ‘How can I escape my fate?’ ‘You must choose your destiny.
There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.
What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?
But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?
Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.
I think therefore I am. Does that mean ‘I feel therefore I’m not’? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.
Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That’s where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?
Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently
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.
Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world.
I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won’t be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.
Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.
Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run?
Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?
My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, “David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,’ my mind repeating Schrodinger’s Cat, Schrodinger’s Cat.
I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.
A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
Women always bring it back to the personal,’ said Handsome. ‘It’s why you can’t be world leaders.”And men never do,’ I said, ‘which is why we end up with no world left to lead.
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.
Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.
Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
If I can’t stay where I am, and I can’t, then I will put all that I can into the going.
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. Some people’s emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.
People do go back, but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here.
When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.
Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture
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 know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.
The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.
We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don’t heal by forming a secret society of one – by assessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.
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.
To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.
You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.
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.
I won’t eat what I can’t kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical.
I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn’t talking to them.
If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me.
I want to touch you.”And if you did touch me, what then?”I would find a language of beginning.
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
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. And the wound will take you there.
We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.
What you think is the heart might well be another organ.
When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.
I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.
…there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.
There are only three possible endings —aren’t there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.
Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.
Where you are born–what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own– stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
When you are born–what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own– stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.
…to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.
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.
And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?
People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.
After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, “I fuck therefore I am”.
I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.
One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn’t happen to everyone.
Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!
I never wanted to find my birth parents – if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive…I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.
She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice.
If you think about something for long enough,’ she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.’ She tapped her head. `It’s all in the mind.
They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.
A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.
Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.
Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said ’27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS’.It might as well have said ’27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON’.
I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.
Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.
There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.
By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.
In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.
I wasn’t getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didn’t want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
Look at all that rubbish,” she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all.”They’re taking it away,” I said. “Where to?” she said. “It just gets moved around dearie, that’s all.
you act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.
Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together.Forgiveness unblocks the future.” (p.225)
The journey is about coming home….There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail.” (p. 220,222)
I have ridden out all the storms,” said Shakespeare, “even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…
Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. “I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.
Shakespeare,” he thought as he scribbled away. “Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.
What is luck’, he said, ‘but the ability to exploit accidents?
There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
There’s no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear.
You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?
gifts — that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.
Why doesn’t she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can’t get warm… She won’t be cold. She has the sun inside her.
She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.
What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?
A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.
We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone’s own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it.
The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.
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?
Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?
Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you’re getting old.
Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.
I believe in communication books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.