Quote

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.

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
Life
Selfish
Like
Resources
Short
Withdraw
Hold
Timid
Keep
Reserve
Back
Resource
Best
Reserves
Self
Supply

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

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Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.
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I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
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Names are still magic even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.
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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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Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.
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Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
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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 may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.
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The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.
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A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.
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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?
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Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.
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Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.
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I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
Jeanette Winterson
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My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.
Jeanette Winterson
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And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
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I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.
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Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
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Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.
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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.
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