1,104 Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

I'm not afraid of what I am. I'm afraid I will see what I am not.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

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 a different kind of space.

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.