316 quotes found
Writer · English · 1959
English writer (born 1959)
“I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.”
“A tough life needs a tough languageand that is what poetry is. That is what literature offersa language powerful enough to say how it is.”
“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our s...”
“[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.”
“Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.”
“Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone love...”
“Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.”
“Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”
“I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, th...”
“Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- "...”
“Examine this statement: A woman cannot be a poet. Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?”
“Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”
“I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.”
“Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.”
“And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes ...”
“He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow ...”
“Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.”
“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
“I believe you have to write every daymake the time. Its about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their ...”
“Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We ...”
