Quote

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.

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
Anything
Longing
Better
Likely
Need
Destroy
Giving
Balance
Aloneness
Needs
Maybe
Railway
Things
Else
Contradiction
Love
Two
Tension
Like
Give
Holding

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

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It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.
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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We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.
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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What you risk reveals what you value.
Jeanette Winterson
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Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.
Jeanette Winterson
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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.
Jeanette Winterson
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I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
Jeanette Winterson
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If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
Jeanette Winterson
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I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all.
Jeanette Winterson
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Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.
Jeanette Winterson
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We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.
Jeanette Winterson
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In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening.
Jeanette Winterson
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Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur.
Jeanette Winterson
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Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
Jeanette Winterson
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We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
Jeanette Winterson
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The key to happiness ... is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.
Jeanette Winterson
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As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
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We're in a strange situation where people either don't read at all or they read a lot. There's a huge gap in between. That's something that would be good to bridge so it doesn't have to be one thing or the other. Books could be part of life in a more relaxed way. I'd like to see that.
Jeanette Winterson
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Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?
Jeanette Winterson