Quote

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

Jeanette Winterson

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Jeanette Winterson
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: August 27
Author
Film Producer
Journalist
Novelist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Manchester
England
Talk
Adult
Word
Catch
Talking
Blow
Happy
Adults
Children
Wind
Trying
Easier
Much
Asks
Child
Largely

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

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Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?
Jeanette Winterson
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He: What’s the matter with you? Me: Nothing. Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, but there was nothing the matter with her.
Jeanette Winterson
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She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.
Jeanette Winterson
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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
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The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.
Jeanette Winterson
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I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
Jeanette Winterson
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I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.
Jeanette Winterson
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Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.
Jeanette Winterson
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There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.
Jeanette Winterson
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Writing objects to the lie that life is small. Writing is a cell of energy. Writing defines itself. Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant. Writing exhibits boldness. Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us. Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life.
Jeanette Winterson
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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?
Jeanette Winterson
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As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience.
Jeanette Winterson
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A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.
Jeanette Winterson
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We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.
Jeanette Winterson
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There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.
Jeanette Winterson
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History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.
Jeanette Winterson
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There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
Jeanette Winterson
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A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you.
Jeanette Winterson
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Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
Jeanette Winterson
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Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
Jeanette Winterson