Yes we are (friends) and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn’t mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don’t want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn’t bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet.
—Jeanette Winterson
Topics: Friendship
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.
—Jeanette Winterson
Is that what I want? The model family, two plus two in an easy home assembly kit? I don’t want a model, I want the full-scale original. I don’t want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new.
—Jeanette Winterson
Topics: Family, Body, New
I was happy but happy is an adult world. 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.
—Jeanette Winterson
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
—Jeanette Winterson
Topics: Curiosity
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
Topics: Storytelling
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
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
Topics: Heroes, Heroes/Heroism, Heroism
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
Topics: Love
To live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to. Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it (the standard model)? Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
—Jeanette Winterson
Topics: Risk-taking, Beauty, Try, Great, Rent, Think, Live, Discover, Risk, Love, Better, Lies
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Margaret Drabble English Novelist
- G. K. Chesterton English Journalist
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
- E. M. Forster English Novelist
- D. H. Lawrence English Novelist
- George Gissing English Novelist
- J. G. Ballard English Novelist
- Katharine Whitehorn English Journalist
- Brian Aldiss English Novelist
- Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
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