Jeanette Winterson

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.

— Jeanette Winterson

Time is a great deadener; people forget, get bored, grow old, go away.

— Jeanette Winterson

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

— Jeanette Winterson

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

— Jeanette Winterson

He: What’s the matter with you?

— Jeanette Winterson

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.

— Jeanette Winterson

Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own.

— Jeanette Winterson

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 in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

— Jeanette Winterson

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

— Jeanette Winterson

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

— Jeanette Winterson

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

— Jeanette Winterson

Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

— Jeanette Winterson

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

— Jeanette Winterson

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

— 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

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.

— Jeanette Winterson

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

— Jeanette Winterson

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

— Jeanette Winterson

That's the trouble with time. Never happens when it should.

— Jeanette Winterson

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.

— Jeanette Winterson

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

— Jeanette Winterson