Quote

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

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
Lying
Pull
Future
Believed
Enacted
Force
Patterns
Ancients
Strong
Burden
Intolerable
Past
Fate
Inherited
Change
Behavior
Crushed
Anything
Present
Helpless
Hard
Anyone
Recognized

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We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.
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Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
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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.
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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.
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No emotion is the final one.
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I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.
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Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
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It's great to win a few prizes early on. It helps a writer to get noticed and to get some sales. It can also be a pain in the arse because it gets in the way of the quiet, contemplative time every writer needs, but which is particularly important when you are a new writer finding your own voice, and pursuing the things that interest you.
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Life was a pre-death experience.
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Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
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Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.
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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.
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Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one
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What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
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Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.
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They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.
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Perhaps all romance is like that not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.
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I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.
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I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.
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To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
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