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It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.

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
Trouble
Causes
Cliches
Cliche
Seeks
Precise
Cause
Expression
Emotion

More quotes by Jeanette Winterson

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What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
Jeanette Winterson
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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.
Jeanette Winterson
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The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.
Jeanette Winterson
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Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.
Jeanette Winterson
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Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.
Jeanette Winterson
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Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.
Jeanette Winterson
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The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.
Jeanette Winterson
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What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
Jeanette Winterson
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There are so many separate selves no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
Jeanette Winterson
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Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.
Jeanette Winterson
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I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.
Jeanette Winterson
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The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.
Jeanette Winterson
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A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn't it?
Jeanette Winterson
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Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg -- it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.
Jeanette Winterson
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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.
Jeanette Winterson
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unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.
Jeanette Winterson
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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?
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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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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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