“After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, "I fuck therefore I am".”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“Know thyself,’ said Socrates.
Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“The fatal combination of indulgence without feeling disgusts me. Strange to be both greedy and dead. For myself, I prefer to hold my desires just out of reach of appetite, to keep myself honed and sharp. I want the keen edge of longing. it is so easy to be a brute and yet it has become rather fashionable. Is that the consequence of leaving your body to science? Of assuming that another pill, another drug, another car, another pocket-sized home-movie station, a DNA transfer, or the complete freedom of choice that five hundred TV channels must bring, will make everything all right? Will soothe the nagging pain in the heart that the latest laser scan refuses to diagnose? The doctor's surgery is full of men and women who do not know why they are unhappy. "Take this", says the Doctor, "you'll soon feel better." They do not feel better, because, little by little, they cease to feel at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“The asynarte city; two rhythms unconnected, profanity, holiness, and out of that strange bed, art.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“It's so crude' complained her mother, who believed in Good Taste the way Sunday worshipers believed in the Immaculate Conception. She wasn't quite sure what it was but she was sure it was important.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am a wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“I need the dark places to get outside of common sense”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“I put the words into a flask and flung them out to sea. Flung them far out from me, made through myself, but not myself. Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.
The world is packed tight with fools.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“I have come so far so fast that I haven't had time to ask whether or not this is where I want to be”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“What's left? Romance. Love's counterfeit free of charge to all. Fall into my arms and the world with its sorrows will shrink up into a tinsel ball. This is the favorite antidote to the cold robot life of faraway perils and nearby apathy. Apathy. From the Greek A Pathos. Want of feeling. But, don't we know, only find the right boy, only find the right girl, and the feeling will be yours. My colleagues tell me I need just such a remedy. Buried up to my neck in pink foam nothing can hurt me now. Safe to feel. All I can feel is you darling.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“The words come at my call but who calls whom?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“He turned away and I turned to him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. Ignorant of alchemy they put their faith in technology and turned the whole world into gold. The dead sand shone.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colors, guillotine colors of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
“Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandones class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
Jeanette Winterson
Born place: in Manchester, England, The United Kingdom
Born date August 27, 1959
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“He had been out among the dragons, he said, and he assured himself that they were not so hideous as he had imagined them. Also,”
― Stephen Crane, quote from The Red Badge of Courage
“It is my observations, though, that happiness limits the amount of suffering one is willing to inflict upon others”
― Jacqueline Carey, quote from Kushiel's Dart
“Zach walked away, but I stood there for a long time, wondering if I should go to my mother; if I should go to my friends; but instead I slipped into the corridors I hadn't used in months, pushed my way through cobwebs and darkness, trying to walk away from the tears that burned hot down my cheeks, because maybe I didn't want to admit weakness; maybe I wanted to wallow in my solitude and grief.
Or maybe crying is like everything else we do—it's best if you don't get caught.”
― Ally Carter, quote from Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy
“Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Year of Wonders
“Animal Farm is not a book about how pigs—animals—when bestowed with power start to behave like men. It is a book about how men, when given power over other men, start to behave like pigs.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984
The Leopard
Mirror Mirror
Confessions of a Cra...
Leonardo's Notebooks
The Horse's MouthBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
