Jeanette Winterson · 151 pages
Rating: (4.5K votes)
“I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“The free man never thinks of escape.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“We don’t know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who’s kidding whom?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
“Atlas gazed out, as he always did, into infinite space, wishing he could be part of it, even for one hour.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
Jeanette Winterson
Born place: in Manchester, England, The United Kingdom
Born date August 27, 1959
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“That's one of those things about love. It always assumes it can find a way to express itself.”
― Bob Goff, quote from Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World
“The man who said, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed," put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised." The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for he shall inhereit the earth. Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from Heretics
“If today is the day you feel lonely... Then today is the day you are ready to take any action and do anything you were afraid of”
― quote from We Were Three
“IF YOU LEARN TO TRUST ME—really trust Me—with your whole being, then nothing can separate you from My Peace.”
― quote from Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence
“When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”
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