“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“What you risk reveals what you value.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it? ”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love. ”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? ”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“You said, ‘I’m going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.’ I’ve hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one’s watching. They haven’t faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“You are a pool of clear water where the light plays”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
“I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Written on the Body
Jeanette Winterson
Born place: in Manchester, England, The United Kingdom
Born date August 27, 1959
See more on GoodReads
“...perhaps they will remember Chris Creed and they will find their tolerance, their compassion.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from The Body of Christopher Creed
“For what profit comes to mortals from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which they toil under the sun? 23 Every day sorrow and grief are their occupation; even at night their hearts are not at rest.”
― quote from St. Joseph New American Bible
“The occult town was vibrant, busy with fiddles playing themselves on street corners, and enchanted paper lanterns hanging mysteriously string-less in the dead of night. Lycanthropes chattered with each other in alleyways between the hotels and inns. Fairies stalked in the shadows, preying on unfortunate cats and mice. Hearty Elves with round bellies and rosy smiles worked late into the night, pushing their wooden carts filled with baked goods and meats.”
― Shayne Leighton, quote from Of Light and Darkness
“Yes, I have loved as none in the world ever loved—with an insensate and furious passion—so violent that I am astonished it did not cause my heart to burst asunder. Ah, what nights—what nights!”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Clarimonde
“Burke continued: “We need to get Lanie out of here before the paparazzi start camping on the doorstep. I’ve called for a medical van to pick her up and take her back to her house.” “What’s going”
― Alan Russell, quote from Exposure
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DuskBookQuoters 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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