Jeanette Winterson Quotes
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Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
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To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
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Only the impossible is worth the effort.
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My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.
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He doesn't understand I want the freedom to make my own mistakes.
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Bask in it. In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion.
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If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
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Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate. (p.74)
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In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.
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My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.
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Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. The way there is sudden. The way out is worse.
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They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty - even for a moment - it is enough.
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If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.
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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 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.
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My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.
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Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.
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I am a glass man, but there is no light in me that can shine across the sea. I shall lead no one home, save no lives, not even my own.
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Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a café, years ago.
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There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.
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With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.
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Tell me a story, Pew.
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I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.
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To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run.
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He's the kind of man who was born to rise and rise: a human elevator. (p.7)