“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm… maybe if I hadn’t gone with Spike… maybe if I could have lived more peaceably… maybe if I’d met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn’t done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But 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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of it's own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as seperate as another continent. The work you do, if it has any meaning, passes to other hands. The day slides into a night's dreaming.
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. (p.87)”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“I looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself.
I was up to my chin when the shout came, and I will never forget it. Never. For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering — when I can no longer speak, hear me.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it?” (205)”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Human beings often display emotions they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not display.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.'
'And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“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.
Love is an intervention.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“There’s a planet called Echo. It doesn’t exist. It’s like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and the deck empty. It comes on the radar, you fly towards it, there’s nothing there. Our crew were outside, repairing the craft, and we saw it moving at speed right at us. It passed straight through the ship and through our bodies, and the strange thing that happened was the bleach. It bleached our clothes and hair, and men that had black beards had white. Then it was gone, echoing in another part of the starry sky, always, ‘here’ and ‘here’ and ‘here’, but nowhere. Some call it Hope.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Women are just planets that attract the wrong species.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught by a radio receiver, light years later, like a recorded message nobody heard, back-played now into infinity across time. Love and loss.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“There’s a planet,’ said Spike, ‘made of water, entirely of water, where every solid thing is its watery equivalent. There are no seas because there is no land. There are no rivers because there are no banks. There is no thirst because there is no dry.
‘The planet is like a bowl of water except that there is no bowl. It hangs in space as a drop of water hangs from a leaf, except that there is no leaf. It cannot exist, and yet it does. I tell you this so you know that what is impossible sometimes happens.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“moss that is concentrating on being green.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“There are two questions: where have you come from, and where are you going? But the brain doesn't have separate regions for the past and future; only the present is differentiated by the brain.
We split time into three parts. The brain, it seems, splits it twice only: now, and not now.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“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
“Humans have given away all their power to a “they”. You aren’t able to fight the system because without the system none of you can survive.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
Jeanette Winterson
Born place: in Manchester, England, The United Kingdom
Born date August 27, 1959
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“Let us work without reasoning,' said Martin; 'it is the only way to make life endurable.”
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“They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from The Things They Carried
“Cardinal Wolsey, the butcher’s son, is indeed the hero of “Henry VIII.,” but his humble origin is only mentioned incidentally as something to be ashamed of.”
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