Jeanette Winterson - Tumblr Posts
There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be 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.
Jeanette Winterson
While I can't have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I'd take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I'd wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning.
-Jeanette Winterson
“I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.”
— Why I adore the night, by Jeanette Winterson (via lostpolaroids)
I made him walk on a lead and he jumped for joy, the way creatures do, the way children do, the way adults don't do, and spend their lives wondering where that leap went.
Jeanette Winterson, “The 24-Hour Dog”, The World and Other Places
This was the edge of time, between chaos and shape. This was the little bit of evolution that endlessly repeats itself in the young and new-born thing. In this moment, there are no cars and aeroplanes. The Sistine Chapel is unpainted, no book has been written. There is the moon, the water, the night, one creature's need and another's response. The moment between chaos and shape and I say his name and he hears me.
Jeanette Winterson, “The 24-Hour Dog”, The World and Other Places
He was to be my dog, shot out of a spring litter. A coil of happiness. Bit by bit he would unfold.
Jeanette Winterson, “The 24-Hour Dog”, The World and Other Places
“Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognize its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (via luthienne)
from art objects: essays in ecstasy and effrontery, which is an undeniably great title.
“To change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.”
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson (via velvetmelody)
The forests can be levelled and the roads made straight, but the wild things go deeper, beyond detection, and wait.
—Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook
This new world weighs a yatto-gram. But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or blurred-out-of-focus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed clawprints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish. Trees like skyscrapers, and housing as many. Grass the height of hedges, nuts the swell of pumpkins. Sardines that would take two men to land them. Eggs, pale-blue-shelled, each the weight of a breaking universe. And, underneath, mushrooms soft and small as a mouse ear. A crack like a cut, and inside a million million microbes wondering what to do next. Spores that wait for the wind and never look back. Moss that is concentrating on being green.
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (via wholesomeobsessive)
“I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.”
— Jeanette Winterson