1,104 Quotes by Jeanette Winterson

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge.

What I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spread the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

One of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal. The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the national identity, all the things that a particular kind of man with a particular kind of power urge adores, these are the things that become important. War gives the lie to the personal, drowns it in meetings, alarms, sacrifices. The personal is only allowed to return as death.

Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.