Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces – sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.

— Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Humans don’t share; we exploit.

— Jeanette Winterson

Perhaps I wasn’t a child of God at all, but the daughter of a Frenchman.

— Jeanette Winterson

He had never talked of what he wanted to do, where he was going, he never joined in the aimless conversations that clustered round the idea of something better in another time. He didn’t believe in the future, only the present, and as our future, our years, had turned so relentlessly into identical presents, I understood him more.

— Jeanette Winterson

When Lot’s wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it’s a poor exchange for losing your self.

— Jeanette Winterson

Does the body hate itself so much that it seeks release at any cost?

— Jeanette Winterson

A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I’ll take a chance.

— Jeanette Winterson

But the rags and the ribbons turn to years and then the years are gone.

— Jeanette Winterson

The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe – no way to see what’s inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble.

— Jeanette Winterson

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity.

— Jeanette Winterson

So the past, because it is the past, is only malleable where once it was flexible.

— Jeanette Winterson

Walls protect and walls limit.

— Jeanette Winterson

Could so many straightforward ordinary lives suddenly become men to kill and women to rape?

— Jeanette Winterson

The wind blew and it didn’t seem important, but tomorrow when the wind blew, it would be important. All the familiar things were getting different meanings.

— Jeanette Winterson

A sign of the times. But the times has so many signs that if we read them all we’d die of heartbreak.

— Jeanette Winterson

Whites find it harder to believe in something to believe in.

— Jeanette Winterson

Over the years I did my best to win a prize; some wish to better the world and still scorn it. But I never succeeded.

— Jeanette Winterson

Be confident even in your mistakes. In Allah there is no wrong road. There is only the road you must travel.

— Jeanette Winterson

I took them into the garden and burned them one by one and I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

— Jeanette Winterson

But you are gazing at me the way God gazed at Adam and I am embarrassed by your look of love and possession and pride. I want to go now and cover myself with fig leaves. It’s a sin this not being ready, this not being up to it.

— Jeanette Winterson

Biology is destiny if you work for the patriarchy.

— Jeanette Winterson
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