Quote

Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.

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
Needs
Roll
Knife
Never
Presence
Pocket
Would
Lovers
Dragons
Like
Dog
Knives
Away
Pet
Need
Helpless
Slay
Feel
Pockets
Valiant
Feels
Beloved
Dragon

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I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.
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Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
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I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
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Perhaps all romance is like that not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.
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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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I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves.
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You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not.
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The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness.
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Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.
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There’s no story that’s the start of itself.
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It's great to win a few prizes early on. It helps a writer to get noticed and to get some sales. It can also be a pain in the arse because it gets in the way of the quiet, contemplative time every writer needs, but which is particularly important when you are a new writer finding your own voice, and pursuing the things that interest you.
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What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
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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.
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.
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I don't want to conquer you I just want to climb you.
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A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you.
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What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?
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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.
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To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.
Jeanette Winterson
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When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary.
Jeanette Winterson