Quote

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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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
Step
Come
Doors
Right
Magic
Steps
Dangerous
Flies
Open
Carpet
Stories
Elsewhere
Back
Door

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

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I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag.
Jeanette Winterson
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Trust me, I'm telling you stories.
Jeanette Winterson
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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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In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.
Jeanette Winterson
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The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.
Jeanette Winterson
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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.
Jeanette Winterson
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I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.
Jeanette Winterson
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To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
Jeanette Winterson
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Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.
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Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith.
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I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing who wants my blood red and vein-blue?
Jeanette Winterson
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When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.
Jeanette Winterson
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It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off.
Jeanette Winterson
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I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.
Jeanette Winterson
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When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.
Jeanette Winterson
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We are all historians in our small way.
Jeanette Winterson
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When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.
Jeanette Winterson
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The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.
Jeanette Winterson
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I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.
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