Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Cannot
Walks
Calmly
Find
Risk
Farther
Right
Answers
Temperature
Something
Fire
Burn
Love
Asks
Longing
Desire
Heat
Away
Answer
Tamer
Nature
Walk
Fierceness

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

Image
I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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
Image
Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value you don't have to go along with any of this you can think for yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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
Image
She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson
Image
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.
Jeanette Winterson