"I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had."
―Jeanette Winterson (via saddest-summer)
―Jeanette Winterson (via saddest-summer)
"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, Gut Symmetries (via helplesslyamazed)
―Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries (via helplesslyamazed)
"What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I’m talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable."
―The Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson (via thechocolatebrigade)
―The Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson (via thechocolatebrigade)
"
―Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (via afewofmyfavourites)
I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.
It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
"―Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (via afewofmyfavourites)
"Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
―Jeanette Winterson (via tacit-delinquency)
―Jeanette Winterson (via tacit-delinquency)
"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."
―Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (via thechocolatebrigade)
―Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (via thechocolatebrigade)
"It has been difficult this past year. Love is difficult. Love gets harder which is not the same as to say that it gets harder to love. You are not hard to love. You are hard to love well. Your standards are high, you won’t settle for the quick way out which is why you made for the door. If I am honest I will admit that I have always wanted to avoid love. Yes give me romance, give me sex, give me fights, give me all the parts of love but not the simple single word which is so complex and demands the best of me this hour this minute this forever."
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
"Poor girls, they are locked outside their words just as the words are locked into meaning."
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
"She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few things a lover should not. Pin her down? She’s not a butterfly. I’m not a wrestler. She’s not a target. I’m not a gun. Tell you what she is? She’s not Lot no. 27 and I’m not one to brag."
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
"We need more Labradors. The world is full of blind people. They don’t see Picasso and me dignified in our love. They see perverts, inverts, tribades, homosexuals. They see circus freaks and Satan worshippers, girl-catchers and porno turn-ons. Picasso says they don’t know how to look at pictures either."
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
"We are quick change artists we girls."
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
―Jeanette Winterson, from: “The Poetics of Sex”
"Maybe it’s my face. Maybe I look like a doormat today. I feel like one."
―Jeanette Winterson, from: Written on the Body
―Jeanette Winterson, 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, from Written on the Body
―Jeanette Winterson, from Written on the Body
"Molecular docking is a serious challenge for bio-chemists. There are many ways to fit molecules together but only a few juxtapositions that bring them close enough to bond. On a molecular level success may mean discovering what synthetic structure, what chemical, will form a union, with say, the protein shape on a tumour cell. If you make this high-risk jigsaw work you may have found a cure for carcinoma. But molecules and the human beings they are a part of exist in a universe of possibility. We touch one another, bond and break, drift away on force-fields we don’t understand. Docking here inside Louise may heal a damaged heart, on the other hand it may be an expensively ruinous experiment."
―Jeanette Winterson, from Written on the Body
―Jeanette Winterson, from Written on the Body
"Telling the truth, she said, was a luxury we could not afford and so lying became a virtue, an economy we had to practice. Telling the truth was hurtful and so lying became a good deed."
―Jeanette Winterson, from: Written on the Body
―Jeanette Winterson, from: Written on the Body
