I can change the story. I am the story.
Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.
Being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love.
They never say, I love you with all my kidneys. I love you with my liver. They never say, my gall bladder is yours and yours alone. No one says, she broke my appendix.
I would never pull down a church! I adore churches. It is what happens inside them that I detest.
All of one’s life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.
There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss.
My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o’clock. Perhaps that’s why I try and have my crises in the evening.
And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn’t poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.
What you think is the heart might well be another organ.
Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am a wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.
I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.
I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss.
You can change everything about yourself – your name, your home, your skin color, your gender, even your parents, your private history – but you can’t change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.
Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things we can’t say, because they are too painful. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.
We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”’ That’s from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.
Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.
It is necessary to distinguish the chalk circle from the stone wall.
I walked round the block thinking I’d think about it, but my legs were heading home, and sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do.