Explore Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there

I have no idea what happens next.

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.

What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

Somewhere between fear and sex passion is.

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.

We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.

I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

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?

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.

The secret of the world is this: the world is entirely circular and you will go round and round endlessly, never finding what you want, unless you have found what you really want inside yourself. When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. Its a reference point, not an end in itself, even though you seem to be following it. So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself. The end of all your exploring will be to cease from exploration and know the place for the first time.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.