Top quotes by Jeanette Winterson

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. Votes: 7

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet." Votes: 7

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. Votes: 6

He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken. Votes: 6

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully. Votes: 5

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected. Votes: 5

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame. Votes: 4

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey. Votes: 4

My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion Votes: 4

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking? Votes: 3

your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught. Votes: 3

Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me." Votes: 3

I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness. Votes: 2

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language. Votes: 2

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being. Votes: 1

Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy. Votes: 1

He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love. Votes: 1

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings. Votes: 1

Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl." Votes: 1

There's a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn't seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books are activities that you do after-hours, rather than things that are at the heart of life. That's a huge change. Votes: 0

You've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance. Votes: 0

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love. Votes: 0

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them. Votes: 0

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks. Votes: 0

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed. Votes: 0

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life. Votes: 0

People being encouraged to make up their own minds and think for themselves is so important. This world talks endlessly about freedom of choice, but we've never been [nothing] more than a nation of robots. Everybody is seduced by corporate culture. Votes: 0

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me. Votes: 0

If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war. Votes: 0

A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it? Votes: 0

Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me. Votes: 0

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older. Votes: 0

I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. Votes: 0

I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult. Votes: 0

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown. Votes: 0

Naked is the best disguise. Votes: 0

Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg -- it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it. Votes: 0

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now. Votes: 0

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break. Votes: 0

Tell me the story, Pew. . . . It was a woman. You always say that. There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good. Is that the complete list? Then there is the woman you love. Who's she? That's another story. Votes: 0

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Votes: 0

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion. Votes: 0

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all. Votes: 0

Age is information failure. The body loses fluency. Votes: 0

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 as 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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't. Votes: 0

You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. Votes: 0

It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off. Votes: 0

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin. Votes: 0

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be 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. Votes: 0

Happy ending are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future. Votes: 0

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen. Votes: 0

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. Votes: 0

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place. Votes: 0

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can. Votes: 0

Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land. Votes: 0

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication. Votes: 0

The key to happiness ... is tolerance of those who do not do as you do. Votes: 0

Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it. Votes: 0

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence. Votes: 0

Why is the measure of love loss? Votes: 0

Infatuation.First Love.Lust.My passion can be explained away.But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals Votes: 0

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment. Votes: 0

I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue? Votes: 0

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was. Votes: 0

I can't do it. I've been here before and it's not a room with a view. The only power I have is the negative power of withdrawal. If I don't withdraw I have no power at all. A relationship where one person has no power or negative power, isn't a relationship, it's the bond between master and slave. Votes: 0

Great control and great discipline are necessary when you reach your own editing stage of the book, but in the early stages you have to be prepared to let anything happen and to get it wrong or go off track. The development of a character is not smooth or simple - it is as tricky as meeting someone new whom you would like to know better. Votes: 0

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage. Votes: 0

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.' Votes: 0

..to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil. Votes: 0

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak. Votes: 0

Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited. Votes: 0

It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment. Votes: 0

Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing. Votes: 0

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive. Votes: 0

I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here. Votes: 0

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil. Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it. Votes: 0

Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to. Votes: 0

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate. Votes: 0

I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you. Votes: 0

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. Votes: 0

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late! Votes: 0

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me. Votes: 0

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation. Votes: 0

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there. Votes: 0

Reading is a rendezvous with your soul. Votes: 0

I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone. Votes: 0

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it. Votes: 0

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination. Votes: 0

Moss that is concentrating on being green. Votes: 0

The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art. Votes: 0

Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl. Votes: 0

Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative. Votes: 0

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.Or the people who found Atlantis. Votes: 0

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free. Votes: 0

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. Votes: 0

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels. Votes: 0

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich. Votes: 0

There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up. Votes: 0

Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny. Votes: 0

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently Votes: 0

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back? Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. Votes: 0

...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist. Votes: 0

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close. Votes: 0

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire. Votes: 0

the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance. Votes: 0

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.Feel for yourself. Votes: 0

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice. Votes: 0

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise. Votes: 0

For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so. Votes: 0

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. Votes: 0

As your lover describes you, so you are. Votes: 0

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets. Votes: 0

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie. Votes: 0

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise. Votes: 0

Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid. Votes: 0

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door. Votes: 0

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows. Votes: 0

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Votes: 0

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice. Votes: 0

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. Votes: 0

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time. Votes: 0

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea. Votes: 0

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor. Votes: 0

Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant. Votes: 0

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens. Votes: 0

I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world. Votes: 0

What you risk reveals what you value. Votes: 0

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? Votes: 0

Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival. Votes: 0

I'm not a quitter. Votes: 0

Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there. Votes: 0

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue. Votes: 0

In therapy , the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives. Votes: 0

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself. Votes: 0

Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one Votes: 0

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story. Votes: 0

unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. Votes: 0

We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void... For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night? Votes: 0

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other. Votes: 0

Reading is where the wild things are. Votes: 0

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband. Votes: 0

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? Votes: 0

When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as a result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tight-rope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change. Votes: 0

Going back after a long time will make you made, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different. Votes: 0

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Votes: 0

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to. Votes: 0

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped. Votes: 0

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening. Votes: 0

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self. Votes: 0

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough. Votes: 0

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys. Votes: 0

You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play. Votes: 0

Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. Votes: 0

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world. Votes: 0

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility. Votes: 0

Life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It's not really random at all. Votes: 0

You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue. Votes: 0

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. Votes: 0

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back? Votes: 0

I care about doing the work as best as I can do, and that it should go on reaching people. It's not about fame and it's not about me. It's about creating something that might allow someone else to create something. Votes: 0

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home " they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. Votes: 0

While I can't have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I'd take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I'd wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say "Will you"¦' my answer is "Yes', before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close. Votes: 0

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them. Votes: 0

I want to get to the end and feel that I've done all I could, given the limitations and given the opportunities. Votes: 0

You'll get over it"¦" It's the clichÃ©s 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? Votes: 0

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find. Votes: 0

For me, the most painful thing is the thought of shelves without books. This is the problem with the digital thing. I do not want to see it on electronic. I do not want to see all of those indices on Kindle. I don't want this physical object to disappear, because when it's there and it's present, it's continually suggesting new relationships in a way that an electronic index couldn't. Votes: 0

I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies " unconscious strategies " to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too " sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life. It takes courage to feel the feeling " and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. Votes: 0

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value. Votes: 0

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home. Votes: 0

The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world. Votes: 0

It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes. Votes: 0

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Votes: 0

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. 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. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place. Votes: 0

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me. Votes: 0

But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that. Votes: 0

It's great to win a few prizes early on. It helps a writer to get noticed and to get some sales. It can also be a pain in the arse because it gets in the way of the quiet, contemplative time every writer needs, but which is particularly important when you are a new writer finding your own voice, and pursuing the things that interest you. Votes: 0

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Votes: 0

We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content. Votes: 0

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. Votes: 0

Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. Votes: 0

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world? Votes: 0

One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world. Votes: 0

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It's the playing that's irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value. Votes: 0

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's the most exciting place because it's going on for you, and you're in that relationship. In that sense, it's like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It's the two of you. It's your own world. Votes: 0

do it from the heart or not at all. Votes: 0

We're in a strange situation where people either don't read at all or they read a lot. There's a huge gap in between. That's something that would be good to bridge so it doesn't have to be one thing or the other. Books could be part of life in a more relaxed way. I'd like to see that. Votes: 0

live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning. Votes: 0

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong. Votes: 0

I know I've had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn't matter if I couldn't make it speak to other people. Votes: 0

After every ''victory'' you have more enemies. Votes: 0

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write. Votes: 0

I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses Votes: 0

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to. Votes: 0

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. Votes: 0

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. Votes: 0

Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return. Votes: 0

If people aren't educated, they can't question. If they can't question, they can't change anything, which is great for the status quo and all the people who can question them at their own level. Votes: 0

The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens. Votes: 0

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out. Votes: 0

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power. Votes: 0

We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling. Votes: 0

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love. Votes: 0

You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not. Votes: 0

I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial. Votes: 0

I believe you have to write every day"make the time. It's about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You're doing the work and running your own business as well. It's an incredibly organized state. [Also reading]"¦one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers. Votes: 0

What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love. Votes: 0

The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe. Votes: 0

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth. Votes: 0

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going. Votes: 0

Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality. Votes: 0

She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it. Votes: 0

Life was a pre-death experience. Votes: 0

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies Votes: 0

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes. Votes: 0

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 Votes: 0

It's better to think of my life like that" part miracle, part madness. It's better if I accept that I can't control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide. Votes: 0

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life. Votes: 0

I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl. Votes: 0

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. Votes: 0

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it. Votes: 0

What 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. Votes: 0

That is what literature offers"a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place. Votes: 0

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel. Votes: 0

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body. Votes: 0

In this life, you have to be your own hero. Votes: 0

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people. Votes: 0

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain. Votes: 0

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? Votes: 0

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself. Votes: 0

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book. Votes: 0

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... Votes: 0

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say "I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead. Votes: 0

Knowing that books are something that is hidden, that almost has that alchemical quality to it. There is a secret society in here, and if you belong to it, you'll be able to transform your lead into gold. I have that rather magical sense about books - that they do, somehow, have special powers. Votes: 0

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead. Votes: 0

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge. Votes: 0

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. Votes: 0

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. Votes: 0

When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary. Votes: 0

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. Votes: 0

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read. Votes: 0

The best language is always found in books because it's considered. It's a high language. Sometimes, it is complex and difficult. It's empowering and offers a way to speak about yourself that you don't have if all you are doing is reading the newspaper and watching TV. Votes: 0

Six books"¦ my mother didn't want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books " that I put myself inside them for safe keeping. Votes: 0

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally. Votes: 0

The people who decided in their wisdom that we're all going to go over to ebooks, they are not readers. These are technical people. These are people who think that somehow this is progress. It isn't. It's regressive. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end. Votes: 0

Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed. Votes: 0

Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. Votes: 0

I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not. Votes: 0

As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience. Votes: 0

We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated. Votes: 0

If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it. Votes: 0

The crazy thing is that when we go to somebody's house, what's better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody's ever going to say, "Can I see the index to your Kindle?" It's so depressing and so unsexy. Sure, it's there, but nobody is going to get excited by that. Votes: 0

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves. Votes: 0

I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all. Votes: 0

What I want does exist if I dare to find it... Votes: 0

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie. Votes: 0

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers. Votes: 0

I learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it's so boring - nothing's happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator's head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It's a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, "what's next?" culture - that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that. Votes: 0

We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel. Votes: 0

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Votes: 0

If you don't educate people well, then you're going to have a lot of violent, angry young men and women. You can go around saying they're all so violent, just throw them in jail, this is an underclass, what can you do? You can create fear. The issue of violence is very suitable for a repressive society. Then you can have more legislation, more police, more laws to fight crime, when all you need to do is to encourage people in a different way. Votes: 0

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society? Votes: 0

I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. Just on the other side of creativity is the nuthouse - and I often notice people looking at me strangely when I am talking out loud, but there is no other way. Votes: 0

Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision. Votes: 0

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances. Votes: 0

Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Votes: 0

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world. Votes: 0

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us. Votes: 0

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. Votes: 0

One just spends as much money as one has. Very peculiar that! You never actually have any money. You think, If I had this much money ten years ago, I would have thought I was amazingly rich, but I still manage to spend it all and not have any left. Votes: 0

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books. Votes: 0

The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees. Votes: 0

The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something. Votes: 0

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. Votes: 0

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find. Votes: 0

I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world. Votes: 0

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? Votes: 0

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness. Votes: 0

In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead. Votes: 0

A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you. Votes: 0

He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love. But they might not be telling the truth. Never mind that. You tell them the truth. What do you mean? You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own. So what should I say? When? When I love someone? You should say it. Votes: 0

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way. Like it or not, you are alone in a forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who's usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as a straw, and away he goes (don't worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he'll find the treasure. Votes: 0

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning? Votes: 0

I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe. Votes: 0

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped. Votes: 0

Explore me' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know. Votes: 0

He: What's the matter with you? Me: Nothing. Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her. Votes: 0

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries. Votes: 0

Where did love begin?What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary,dragging home food, arms cut and scarred,that you saw yellow flowers, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you? 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. Votes: 0

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Votes: 0

Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut. Votes: 0

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two? Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. Votes: 0

August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade. Votes: 0

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't. Votes: 0

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead. Votes: 0

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost. Votes: 0

Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are. Votes: 0

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

She said she'd often wondered why she wanted to do some things and not do other things at all. Well, it was obvious with some things, but for others, there was no reason there. She'd spent a long time puzzling it out, then she thought that what you'd done in a past life you didn't need to do again, and what you had to do in the future, you wouldn't be ready to do now. Votes: 0

She was a monster, but she was my monster. Votes: 0

I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left. Votes: 0

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Votes: 0

Today, the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love -- all love -- love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafÃ©. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do. Votes: 0

If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found. Votes: 0

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet. Votes: 0

One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but thats quite hard to say casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, and then being on somebody else's. Votes: 0

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you. Votes: 0

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say. Votes: 0

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt. Votes: 0

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Votes: 0

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. Votes: 0

What you eat is the most political thing you do every day Votes: 0

In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening. Votes: 0

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear. Votes: 0

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere. Votes: 0

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued"¦ Votes: 0

I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is. Votes: 0

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world. Votes: 0

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days. Votes: 0

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it. Votes: 0

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way. Votes: 0

I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you. Votes: 0

To create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Votes: 0

If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away. Votes: 0

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify. Votes: 0

Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about. Votes: 0

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end. Votes: 0

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy? Votes: 0

I didn't want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it's rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact. Votes: 0

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar. Votes: 0

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible. Votes: 0

Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same. Votes: 0

There are voices and they must be heard. Votes: 0

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real. Votes: 0

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone. Votes: 0

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position. Votes: 0

To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love Votes: 0

"¦only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world. Votes: 0

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. Votes: 0

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in. Votes: 0

A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor. Votes: 0

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight. Votes: 0

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling. Votes: 0

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing. Votes: 0

St Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry. She wanted to be a nun. She hoped I would be a priest and saved to give me an education while my friends plaited rope and trailed after the plough. I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should. Votes: 0

We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path. Votes: 0

In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. Votes: 0

It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between. Votes: 0

I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken? Votes: 0

"¦I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt. Votes: 0

Don't lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone's little home. Votes: 0

Know thyself,' said Socrates. Know thyself,' said Sappho, "and make sure that the Church never finds out. Votes: 0

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that. Votes: 0

Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light. Votes: 0

I struggled in my mind with all kinds of defenses. Should I be hurt? Surprised? Should I laugh it off? I wanted to say something cruel to expiate my anger and to justify myself. But it's difficult with old friends; difficult because it's so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about. I poured myself a drink and shrugged. 'Nothing's perfect. Votes: 0

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun. Votes: 0

Their throats were bare for God. Votes: 0

Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. Votes: 0

Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don't give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it... Votes: 0

She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t'aime. Votes: 0

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine. Votes: 0

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own. Votes: 0

When my friend Melot set the trap, I think I knew it. I turned to death full face, as I had turned to love with my whole body. I would let death enter me as you had entered me. You had crept along my blood vessels through the wound, and the blood that circulates returns to the heart. You circulated me, you made me blush like a girl in the hoop of your hands. You were in my arteries and my lymph, you were the colour just under my skin, and if I cut myself, it was you I bled. Red Isolde, alive on my fingers, and always the force of blood pushing you back to my heart. Votes: 0

You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word. Votes: 0

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. Votes: 0

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. Votes: 0

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know. Votes: 0

I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this? Votes: 0

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. Votes: 0

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer. Votes: 0

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world. Votes: 0

Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love. Votes: 0

Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past. Of time to come, she says much, but who listens? Votes: 0

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star. Votes: 0

The free man never thinks of escape. Votes: 0

Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. Votes: 0

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots...but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement. Votes: 0

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do now know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That's what I'll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on. Votes: 0

I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag. Votes: 0

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted. Votes: 0

She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected. Votes: 0

I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject. Votes: 0

I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of seperate worlds meeting is very small. The lure is immense. We send starships. We fall in love Votes: 0

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. Votes: 0

That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet. Votes: 0

I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever. Votes: 0

Breathe in, breath out. Oxygen is carcinogenic and likely puts a limit on our life span. It would be unwise though, to try to extend life by not breathing at all. Which of us doesn't do it? Either we loll in anaerobic stupor, too afraid to fill our lungs with risky beauty, or we roll out fire like dragons, destroying the world we love. I try not to burn up my world with rage. It is so hard. Votes: 0

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception. Votes: 0

There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance. Votes: 0

Louise, I would gladly fire the past for you, go and not look back. I have been reckless before, never counting the cost, oblivious to the cost. Now, I've done the sums ahead. I know what it will mean to redeem myself from the accumulations of a lifetime. I know and I don't care. You set before me a space uncluttered by association. It might be a void or it might be a release. Certainly I want to take the risk. I want to take the risk because the life I have stored up is going mouldy. Votes: 0

It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Votes: 0

No emotion is the final one. Votes: 0

i realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy -speed of light power- to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr.right will make the world new. Votes: 0

If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind. Votes: 0

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad. Votes: 0

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different. Votes: 0

In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one. Votes: 0

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you. Votes: 0

I remember once walking out hand in hand with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we'd be rich forever. We filled our pockets and our hair. We were rolled in gold. We ran through the field laughing and our legs and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or golden gods. He kissed my feet, the boy I was with, and when he smiled, he had a gold tooth. It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young. Votes: 0

It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is. Votes: 0

You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden these words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which? Votes: 0

Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her? Votes: 0

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all. Votes: 0

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in. Votes: 0

Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough. Votes: 0

We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes. Votes: 0

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable... Votes: 0

Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. Votes: 0

Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness. Votes: 0

Slightest accidents open up new worlds. Votes: 0

There's no story that's the start of itself. Votes: 0

It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin. Votes: 0

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose. Votes: 0

Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears? Votes: 0

Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There's no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending. Votes: 0

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays Votes: 0

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us. Votes: 0

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS) Votes: 0

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain. Votes: 0

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now. Votes: 0

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past. Votes: 0

I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue. Votes: 0

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings. Votes: 0

The only selfish life is a timid one. Votes: 0

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously. Votes: 0

I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many. Votes: 0

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth. Votes: 0

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds. Votes: 0

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. Votes: 0

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain. Votes: 0

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 their diary when we arrange to meet. Votes: 0

Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself. Votes: 0

The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Votes: 0

Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Votes: 0

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next. Votes: 0

This is a quantum universe ... neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene. Votes: 0

Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other. Votes: 0

Passion is not well bred. Votes: 0

It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists. Votes: 0

The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness. Votes: 0

One of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal. The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the national identity, all the things that a particular kind of man with a particular kind of power urge adores, these are the things that become important. War gives the lie to the personal, drowns it in meetings, alarms, sacrifices. The personal is only allowed to return as death. Votes: 0

Life is so simple when you're just doing your job. Votes: 0

There must be some part of Man that is more than his daily round. Some part of him that will use his profit on a matter of no profit. Votes: 0

I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood. Votes: 0

How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it. Votes: 0

Passion is for holidays, not homecoming. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed - for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you. Votes: 0

It is silence that most needs an answering -- when I can no longer speak, hear me. Votes: 0

Today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected. Votes: 0

Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I'm really a flight animal. Votes: 0

Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another? Votes: 0

Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light. Votes: 0

I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all. Votes: 0

The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I. Votes: 0

The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me? Votes: 0

We are all historians in our small way. Votes: 0

I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It's rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don't stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end. Votes: 0

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. Votes: 0

reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear. Votes: 0

I think we are worlds compressed into human form. Votes: 0

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be. Votes: 0

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. Votes: 0

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience... Votes: 0

More than sex. More than money. You know, life is not endless is it? Cash, cars, cocaine, and girls. It's more than that. And there is a spiritual dimension to people...we are driven to want something more. Votes: 0

The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform. Votes: 0

At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom. Votes: 0

Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings. Votes: 0

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need. Votes: 0

Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur. Votes: 0

Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again. Votes: 0

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art. Votes: 0

A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros. Votes: 0

When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household. Votes: 0

I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder. Theyall want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That's not the kind of heroism they enjoy. Votes: 0

I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Votes: 0

It is the nature of walls that they should fall. Votes: 0

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art. Votes: 0

Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith. Votes: 0

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Votes: 0

I've never been tempted by God but I like his trappings. Votes: 0

When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves. Votes: 0

Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? Votes: 0

Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap. Votes: 0

the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work. Votes: 0

Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail. Votes: 0

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction--don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick. Votes: 0

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement. Votes: 0

...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. Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of Einstein's E=MC squared Votes: 0

Only the impossible is worth the effort. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there Votes: 0

What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us? Votes: 0

I have no idea what happens next Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Two hundred miles from the surface of the earth there is no gravity. The laws of motion are suspended. You could turn somersaults slowly slowly, weight into weightlessness, nowhere to fall. As you lay on your back paddling in space you might notice your feet had fled your head. You are stretching slowly slowly, getting longer, your joints are slipping away from their usual places. There is no connection between your shoulder and your arm. You will break up bone by bone, fractured from who you are, drifting away now, the centre cannot hold. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

What I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spread the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations. Votes: 0

There's so little wonder left in the world because we've seen everything one way or another'. Votes: 0

What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars? Votes: 0

Don't you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn't the mirror hostile enough? Votes: 0

I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving. Votes: 0

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world. That woman-a pieta. Those men, rough angels with an unknown message. The children holding hands, spanning time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you need to know. Votes: 0

Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem. Votes: 0

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run... Votes: 0

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture. Votes: 0

Life"¦we understand it differently at different stages. It's what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference. Votes: 0

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story " of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you " and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something is missing. Votes: 0

There's no such thing as effortless beauty - you should know that. There's no effort which is not beautiful - lifting a heavy stone or loving you. Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance? Votes: 0

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world. Votes: 0

I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people. Votes: 0

I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands. Votes: 0

This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it's getting late. I don't know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields. Votes: 0

Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was. Votes: 0

Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python. Votes: 0

Writing objects to the lie that life is small. Writing is a cell of energy. Writing defines itself. Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant. Writing exhibits boldness. Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us. Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life. Votes: 0

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. Votes: 0

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex. Votes: 0

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort. Votes: 0

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth. Votes: 0

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. Votes: 0

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying. Votes: 0

When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me. He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me. Votes: 0

Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person. Votes: 0

Love is an experiment ... what happens next is always surprising. Votes: 0

What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable. Votes: 0

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? Votes: 0

Language is what stops the heart exploding. Votes: 0

It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose. Votes: 0

It was actually books that started to make those pockets of freedom, which I hadn't otherwise experienced. I do see them as talismans, as sacred objects. I see them as something that will protect me, I suppose, that will save me from things that I feel are threatening. I still think that; it doesn't change. It doesn't change, having money, being successful. So from the very first, if I was hurt in some way, then I would take a book -- which was very difficult for me to buy when I was little -- and I would go up into the hills, and that is how I would assuage my hurt. Votes: 0

The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely. Votes: 0

I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping. Votes: 0

Trust your creativity. Votes: 0

There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that. Votes: 0

What the myths say, is that you have to be the hero of your own life. You're the one who has to take charge of who you are, you're the one who has to take control. And also, you're the one who can bring something to the community. Votes: 0

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Votes: 0

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom. Votes: 0

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent. Votes: 0

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. Votes: 0

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. Votes: 0

If there's one thing I can't stand it's a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it. Votes: 0

Words like passion and ecstasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try to turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell os a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. Votes: 0

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct. Votes: 0

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day. Votes: 0

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue. Votes: 0

Top quotes by Jeanette Winterson

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