Jennifer Palumbo > Jennifer's Quotes

“What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'
Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.
Feel for yourself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“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 Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

“Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

“Naming is a difficult and timeconsuming 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 Winterson

“To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her,
or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love”
― Jeanette Winterson, Powerbook

“Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.”
― Winterson Jeanette

“Why is the measure of love loss?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Know thyself,’ said Socrates.
Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm… maybe if I hadn’t gone with Spike… maybe if I could have lived more peaceably… maybe if I’d met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn’t done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

“I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?”
― Jeanette Winterson

“do it from the heart or not at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

“There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body