“Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing.”

Jeanette Winterson

“If you want to know how a mistress marriage works, ask a triangle. In Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees and parallel lines never meet. Everyone knows the score, and the women are held in tension, away from one another. The shape is beguiling and it could be understood as a new geometry of family life.

Unfortunately, Euclidean theorems work only if space is flat.

In curved space, the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet.

His wife, his mistress, met.”

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

“Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

“Everyone thinks their own situation is most tragic. I am no exception.”

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

“Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away. There was a time in England when everyone was much concerned with building wooden boats and sailing off against the Turks. When that stopped being interesting, what peasants there were left limped back to the land, and what nobles there were left plotted against each other. Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like a string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots....it's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.”

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

“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