Quote

Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

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
Book
Stranger
Straighten
Come
Mirrors
Cushions
Enough
Bed
Strangers
Many
Letters
Hostile
Writing
Books
Kick
Really
Call
Letter
Friends
Kicks
Away
Mirror

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I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
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the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.
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To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
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We are all historians in our small way.
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I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.
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You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?
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Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.
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I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
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The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?
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There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.
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The body shuts down when it has too much to bear goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
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It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.
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Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
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I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.
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If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.
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Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
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What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.
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What you risk reveals what you value.
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