Jeanette Winterson Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with? The Gap of Time

2. But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. 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. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

3. Clo was looking like the cat who got the cream, the kippers, the peanut butter, the sliced chicken and a lifetime's supply of genetically engineered slow-moving mice. The Gap of Time

4. Happiness was still on the other side of a glass door, but at least she could see it through the glass, like a prisoner being visited by a longed-for loved one. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

5. I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

6. I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

7. I tried not to marry you because neither of us have a happy-ever-after story written inside us. The Gap of Time

8. 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. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

9. 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. 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. The Passion

10. 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. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

11. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call. Written on the Body

12. My father sent me away for a time to live in Dundee with a cousin, whose company, he hoped, would improve my solitude. But there is something of a lighthousekeeper in me, and I am not afraid of solitude, nor of nature in her wildness.I found in those days that my happiest times were outside and alone, inventing stories of every kind, and as far from my real circumstances as possible. I became my own ladder and trapdoor to other worlds. I was my own disguise. The sight of a figure, far off, on some journey of his own, was enough to spark my imagination towards a tragedy or a miracle.I was never bored except in the company of others. Frankissstein: A Love Story

13. Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own. Gut Symmetries

14. Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

15. 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. The Passion

16. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it. Written on the Body

17. 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. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

18. What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

19. When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey . . . Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

20. Why is the measure of love loss? Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

21. You’ll get over it… It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? Written on the Body

22. ...These two images put together explain why men find women so threatening . The world comes out of your body and...' (he was waving the Mona Lisa at me) 'we have no idea what's in your head. Do you know how frightening that is? The Gap of Time

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

24. A man needs understanding because he is existentially alone. He stares into the darkness.That was the difference between men and women, Leo thought. Men need groups and gangs and sport and clubs and institutions and women because men know that there is only nothingness and self-doubt. Women were always trying to make a connection, build a relationship. As though one human being could know another. The Gap of Time

25. 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. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

26. And the night unwound as those days and nights do--those days and nights that hijack time. Those days and nights that hold up the car on its way home and gun down the driver and the passengers and leave the wreckage in the rain.You were moving through your days and nights and then the call came. You were thinking about supper or going to bed. You weren't thinking about death and loss. And now there's a flood and it's dark and you're trying to get there before it's too late but it's already too late because the time where there was enough time is over. You don't know how long it is until morning and in the hospital the hands on the clock crawl round like an insect walking the same pane of glass till it dies. The Gap of Time

27. And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman's fortune or one man's loss. And we can't know the lives of others. And we can't know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside of the clocks. It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change. The Gap of Time

28. 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. Gut Symmetries

29. Hope is a duty. Hope is our reality.Shelley says so and he believes it so, but for me the light has gone out. The light inside and the light outside. I have no lantern and no lighthouse. I am at sea in waves too high and the rocks wreck me. Frankissstein: A Love Story

30. 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. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?