“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.”
Jeanette Winterson“He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)”
Jeanette Winterson“Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether it’s solutions to those extra pounds you’re carrying, or to your thinning hair, or to your loss of appetite, loss of love. We are always looking for solutions, but actually what we are engaged in is a process throughout life during which you never get it right. You have to keep being open, you have to keep moving forward. You have to keep finding out who you are and how you are changing, and only that makes life tolerable.”
Jeanette Winterson“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.”
Jeanette Winterson“I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them.”
Jeanette Winterson“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.”
Jeanette Winterson“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.”
Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies“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?”
Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies“But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?”
Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies“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.”
Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies“Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?”
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body