“I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?”

The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

“Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.”

The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

“There's no such thing as a limited victory. One conquest only leads on, ineluctably, to another, to protect what has been won. We found no friends of France on our journey, only crushed enemies. Enemies like you and me with the same hopes and fears, neither good nor bad. I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

But the ordinary people were looking for devils too. The Austrians in particular believed the French to be brutal and beneath contempt. Still believing us to be Italian, they were generous to a fault and compared us favourably in every way to the French. And if I had thrown off my disguise? What then, would I have turned into a devil before their eyes? I worried that they would smell me, that their noses, so disdainful and attuned to hate anything that had a whiff of Bonaparte, would detect me straight away. But it seems we are as we appear. What a nonsense we make of our hatreds when we can only recognize them in the most obvious circumstances.”

The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

“Love has got complicated, tied up with promises, bruised with plans, dogged with an ending that nobody wants - when all love is, is what it always is - that you look at me and want me and I don't turn away. If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. This simplicity of feeling should not be taxed.”

The Powerbook, Jeanette Winterson

“You are closed and shuttered to me now, a room without doors or windows, and I cannot enter. But I fell in love with you under the open sky and death cannot change that.

Death can change the body but not the heart.”

The Powerbook, Jeanette Winterson

“Articulacy of fingers, the language of the deaf and dumb, signing on the body longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message onto my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your Morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter it's pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I don't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.”

Written On The Body, Jeanette Winterson

“I don't like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don't mean it then what else am I? Will I cherish you, adore you, make way for you, make myself better for you, look at you and always see you, tell you the truth? And if love is not those things then what things?”

Written On The Body, Jeanette Winterson

“Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.”

Written On The Body, Jeanette Winterson

“You're not even interesting enough to make me sick.”

The Witches of Eastwick [movie]

“Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.”

'Violence', The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf Recommended by Mea Culpa.

“The youth was drowned in the deepest sea--an atom bombarded, ignorant of all defense in a tumultuous world. The shell of custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud. He was nothing, nobody--there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance--the beginning, as Socrates suggested, of wisdom--he was lost.

He had wanted to cut a figure in the world--he had simply never imagined the number of people that were in it. And like most people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of occasional companionship, forever tender and forever true, which might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a sword.”

Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe

“The youth was drowned in the deepest sea--an atom bombarded, ignorant of all defense in a tumultuous world. The shell of custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud. He was nothing, nobody--there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance--the beginning, as Socrates suggested, of wisdom--he was lost.

He had wanted to cut a figure in the world--he had simply never imagined the number of people that were in it. And like most people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of occasional companionship, forever tender and forever true, which might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a sword.”

Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe

“Typical 1950s bohemia. Everybody sat around shaking their heads over America's tailfin, housing-development civilization, and Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn't work, they had mastered the art of living. Occasionally somebody would suggest an orgy or a three-day wine binge, but the model was always that old Zorba the Greek romanticism of sandals and simplicity and back to first principles. Periodically they would take pilgrimages 40 miles north to North Beach to see how it was actually done.”

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”

This Boy's Life: A Memoir, Tobias Wolff

“After the third barrage, I counted more than twenty bodies. One cyclist was shot in the back right below our balcony. There were two big puddles of blood on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. People carried the body of a little girl toward the back of the hotel. After twenty-three more minutes, a few people gathered up enough courage to approach the wounded. The soldiers let loose another blast, sending the would-be rescuers scurrying for cover. The crowd was enraged. I grimly kept track of the time. An hour later, the wounded were still on the ground, bleeding to death.

For the rest of the morning, and throughout the afternoon, this scene repeated itself over and over again. In all, I recorded eight long murderous volleys. Dozens died before my eyes. By midafternoon, the crowd was down to about five hundred maniacs who stood on the corner screaming, 'Kill Li Peng! Kill Li Peng!' Only when a steady rain began to fall at 4:15 did they finally drift away. The rain cleansed the street of blood. When it stopped, the crowds returned, and the soldiers fired again, and again, and many more people died.

I thought how strange it was that Beijingers didn't want to get wet, but they weren't afraid of getting killed.”

Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Jan Wong

“Between the tides and double wides, she'd always stop to dream.
For sometimes, it's the quiet ones who grow up to scream.”

Beth Woodson

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.”

Virginia Woolf

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

Virginia Woolf

“The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

A Room Of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

A Room Of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world - a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”

An Unwritten Novel, Virginia Woolf

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

An Unwritten Novel, Virginia Woolf

“I read the book of Job last night -- I don't think God comes well out of it.”

Letters, Virginia Woolf

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

Montaigne, Virginia Woolf

“As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf