Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time. - Jeanette Winterson
Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world. - Jeanette Winterson
I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close. - Jeanette Winterson
Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. - Jeanette Winterson
It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be. - Jeanette Winterson
Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now. - Jeanette Winterson
To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown. - Jeanette Winterson
I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical. - Jeanette Winterson
Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS) - Jeanette Winterson
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination. - Jeanette Winterson
The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling. - Jeanette Winterson
What you think is the heart might well be another organ. - Jeanette Winterson
Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living. - Jeanette Winterson
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead. - Jeanette Winterson
If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going. - Jeanette Winterson
It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong. - Jeanette Winterson
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? - Jeanette Winterson
Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury - Jeanette Winterson
Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture - Jeanette Winterson
Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job. - Jeanette Winterson
I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me. - Jeanette Winterson
I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life. - Jeanette Winterson
I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them. - Jeanette Winterson
Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world. - Jeanette Winterson
Language is a finding-place not a hiding place. - Jeanette Winterson
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. - Jeanette Winterson
The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live. - Jeanette Winterson
He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.( on T.S.Eliot) - Jeanette Winterson
Be with someone you don't want to be without. - Jeanette Winterson
your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught. - Jeanette Winterson
I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss. - Jeanette Winterson
I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances. - Jeanette Winterson
Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is. - Jeanette Winterson
What you risk reveals what you value. - Jeanette Winterson
Marriage isn't for life any more -- life is too long. Marriage is for love. Love gladly accepts responsibility. Love wants commitment. Marriage should be celebrated as the optimistic and glorious thing that it is. We can't call it a failure if it doesn't last forever. - Jeanette Winterson
There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that. - Jeanette Winterson
جمع الكتب هو استحواذ، ومرض، وإدمان، وفتنة، وقدر. هو ليس بهواية. من يقوم بذلك فلأنه عليه القيام به. ومن لا يقوم بذلك، فيعتقد أنه شبيه بجمع الطوابع - Jeanette Winterson