1,104 Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.

There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.

If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.

What you think is the heart might well be another organ.

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space.There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I'm warm.

The photographer frames the shot, writers frame their world.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.