Quotes from Gut Symmetries

“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.
I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? 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 separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“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”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“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?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“I love badly. That is too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“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?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“I am civilised. My feelings are not.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“I say I appear naked before you, but so often I whistle for my invisible armed guard; the gap-toothed, jeering, club-headed mob, my feelings, that are used to having me to themselves.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“The grey city and its lost hearts force its way between myself and my healing.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people kept fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

“Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will probably be all right, I'm told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Gut Symmetries

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BookQuoters 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.

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