And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

— Jeanette Winterson

Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'. It might as well have said '27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON'.

— Jeanette Winterson

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

— Jeanette Winterson

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis.

— Jeanette Winterson

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.

— Jeanette Winterson

As your lover describes you, so you are.

— Jeanette Winterson

At bedtime I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. Furthermore, I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. Furthermore, I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.

— Jeanette Winterson

Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?' Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.' 'How can I escape my fate?' 'You must choose your destiny.

— Jeanette Winterson

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

— Jeanette Winterson

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, plowed under.

— Jeanette Winterson