(b. 1959– )
English novelist, journalist, and gourmet food shop owner
Jeanette Winterson
Try micro-dosing your change. Bring difference and variety into your life. Don’t keep doing what makes you feel dull, rigid, resentful, whatever. Be creative in the small changes—that, in itself, makes you mindful and aware. You’re not just going through the motions; you’re in motion.
“The Challenge of Change,” Jeanette Winterson’s Substack, February 20, 2022.
If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 164.
The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 144.
Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 77.
Aunt Nellie cannot have had much money. Twice a week she had all the neighborhood children she could squeeze into her one room and she made onion soup or potato soup and all the children brought their own cup and she ladled it out off the stove.
She taught them songs and she told them Bible stories and thirty or forty skinny hungry kids queued outside and sometimes brought things from their mothers—buns or toffees—and everybody shared. They all had nits. They all loved her and she loved them. She called her dank dark little house with its one window and black walls “Sunshine Corner.”
It was my first lesson in love.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 75.
The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own. I looked up at the enormous stained-glass window and the beautiful oak staircase. I loved that building.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 127.
When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 8.
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 169.
Our mental processes are closer to a maze than a motorway.
“Redemption Songs,” by Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, May 29, 2004.
I don’t understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it’s a mind-altering possibility. I don’t even want to please the reader, I want to change them, to expand their imaginations, seduce them, free them, take them to a place they haven’t been before.
“Redemption Songs,” by Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, May 29, 2004.
The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
Written on the Body (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 156.
If truth is that which lasts, then art has proved truer than any other human endeavor. What is certain is that pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired.
Art Objects: Essays in Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), epigraph