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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You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue.
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How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
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[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
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Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.
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She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.
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A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros.
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Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.
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What you risk reveals what you value.
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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.
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Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.
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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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Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.
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I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
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Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
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There’s no story that’s the start of itself.
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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.
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In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.
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Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
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