Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

“As it is, I can’t settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.”

Jeanette Winterston, The World and Other Places

“What is there to say about love? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn’t be any different, wouldn’t feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can’t tame we talk about.”

“Today we have reached the middle, the point of no return. Today the future is nearer than the past.”

“Is compassion possible between a man and woman? When I say (as I have not said), ‘I want to take care of you’, do I mean ‘I want you to take care of me’?

“The future is still intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was. Every action and decision led her here. The moment had been waiting, they way the top step of the stairs waits for the sleep walker. She had fallen and now she is awake.”

“No safety without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.”

“I no longer knew which way I wanted to go. Pursuit or retreat. In life, ordinary lifetime life, it is so easy to march down the road until your legs finally give way and everyone crows round the coffin and declare you did your best. You didn’t though did you? The road was marked and you took it. Never mind that it was a ring road circling the heart.”