There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that.There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you.Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be eas...
There was a man here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories li...
The wider we read the freer we become.
The past is magnetic. It draws us in.
Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. I'm surprised at myself talking in this way.
Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wan...
It is snowing. In the English language we do not know anything about the 'it' that is snowing. It might be God. Maybe not. Anyway. It. Is. Snowing.
In my country there are no gods left. The Romans have driven them out. There are some who say that they have hidden themselves in the mountains, but I do not believe it. Three nights I have been on th...
I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something...
I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.
One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone.
He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.
You are young, said my father. You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day.You'll get older, said my mother, that's what happens.Then what happens?You won't be able to find the...
Why is the measure of love loss?
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.
She looked at me. There was a second the kind that holds the whole world ...
Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.
In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.