“I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged...”
Work
Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.
Quotes
Showing 1-22 of 22
Jeanette Winterson
Canonical work source
“I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged...”
“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses i...”
“Mia madre non voleva che i libri cadessero nelle mie mani. Non aveva previsto che io potessi cadere nei libri, che mi infilassi dentro di loro per stare al sicuro.”
“I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the ve...”
“Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?”
“Why is the measure of love loss?”
“She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her. I think I do know her now, but it is too late.”
“Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.”
“She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.”
“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 in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupi...”
“Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time...”
“If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long,...”
“The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority - of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too.”
“Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That...”
“There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.”
“Ti do un consiglio: quando sei giovane e ti capita di leggere qualcosa che non ti piace affatto, mettilo da parte e rileggilo tra tre anni dopo. Se ancora non ti piace, rileggilo dopo altri...”
“Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.”
“The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that...”
“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home--they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time a...”
“I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z. But this was different. I read [in, Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot]: This is one mom...”
“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.”
“Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot...”