“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
Jeanette Winterson
Born place: in Manchester, England, The United Kingdom
Born date August 27, 1959
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“I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Help me,' Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs
“It was Hitler’s style, his oratorical talents and his remarkable ability to transmit emotions and feelings in his speeches, that took him to the leadership of the ragtag party of misfits and adventurers that he joined in Munich in 1919 and that called itself the German Workers’ Party. The ideas he and the party spouted were all tattered; they were nothing but jargon inherited from the paranoid Austro-German border politics of the pre-1914 era, which saw “Germanness” threatened with inundation by “subject nationalities.” Even the combination “national socialist,” which Hitler added to the party’s name when he became leader in 1920, was borrowed from the same era and same sources. It was not the substance—there was no substance to the frantic neurotic tirades—that allowed the party to survive and later to grow. It was the style and the mood. It was above all the theater, the vulgar “art,” the grand guignol productions of the beer halls and the street.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
“There's no way that can be the river," Rhiow said.
"Rhi, the ceiling of Grand Central--" Saash said.
"It's backward," Rhiow snapped, "thank you very much, I know all about it."
"Is it?" Saash said. "Which direction are you coming at it from?"
Rhiow closed her mouth and thought about that.”
― Diane Duane, quote from The Book of Night with Moon
“The man who can't do most things and won't do the rest”
― Joseph Conrad, quote from The Nigger of the Narcissus
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The Merchant of Veni...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.
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