Jeanette Winterson The Powerbook Quotes

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.

The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.

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

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.

I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.

Slightest accidents open up new worlds.

I don't want to conquer you; I just want to climb you.

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run...

What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way. Like it or not, you are alone in a forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who’s usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as a straw, and away he goes (don’t worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he’ll find the treasure.

In this life, you have to be your own hero.

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 easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

The only selfish life is a timid one.

I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

I can't do it. I've been here before and it's not a room with a view. The only power I have is the negative power of withdrawal. If I don't withdraw I have no power at all. A relationship where one person has no power or negative power, isn't a relationship, it's the bond between master and slave.

The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.

I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses

History is a madman's museum.

If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can't work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter. Let me in. You do.

Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.

I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips.

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

I remember once walking out hand in hand with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we'd be rich forever. We filled our pockets and our hair. We were rolled in gold. We ran through the field laughing and our legs and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or golden gods. He kissed my feet, the boy I was with, and when he smiled, he had a gold tooth. It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young.

There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.

I can change the story. I am the story.

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.

What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end.

And if the road leads nowhere?’ He shrugged. ‘Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere.

...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down

The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Take two people. Slice lengthways. Boil with the lid on. Add a marriage, a past, another woman. Sugar to taste. Pass through a chance meeting. Lubricate sparingly. Serve on a bed of – or is it in a bed of –? Use fresh and top with raw emotion.

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.

Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things.

The past is magnetic. It draws us in.

Here's my life - I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed.

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 treasure." "Will I be too old to look for it?" "No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.

And I thought of us, years and years later, you and I, in Paris, and how you seemed to be saying we had every choice, every chance. You acted as though you were free, but you were a ransom note. I paid to watch. I watched your fingers, your red mouth. I watched you undress. I didn't see you go. Later I was still paying and I never counted the cost. You were worth it. Again and again you were worth it. My heart has unlimited funds. Draw on them. Draw them down. Draw me down on top of you. How much? Everything? All right.

There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.

The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.

This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.

So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all'.

Be confident even in your mistakes. In Allah there is no wrong road. There is only the road you must travel.

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.

But what if my body is the disguise? What if skin, bone, liver, veins are the things I use to hide myself? I have to put them on and I can't take them off. Does that trap me or free me?

Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.

Be confident, he advised me. 'Be confident even in your mistakes. In Allah there is no wrong road. There is only the road you must travel' 'And if the road leads nowhere?' He shrugged. 'Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere.

All human love is a dramatic enactment of the wild, reckless, unquenchable, undrainable love that powers the universe. If death is everywhere and inescapable, then so is love, if we but knew it. We can begin to know it through each other. The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love’s nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love’s fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all. —Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook (‎ Vintage Books, January 1, 2001)

Kom naar beneden!’ Ik kwam naar beneden, en toen ik weer op de grond stond, gaf mijn moeder me twee klappen in mijn gezicht. Wat zijn dat voor spelletjes?’ Ik wilde de Wildernis zien.’ Er is daar niets. Dat weet je.’ Als er niets is, kan het ook geen kwaad.’ Niets is het gevaarlijkste dat er is.’ Waarom?’ Als er niets is, kun je iets bedenken. Je zult de leegte niet kun¬nen verdragen. Het zal evengoed leeg zijn, maar je zult jezelf wijsmaken dat dat niet zo is.’ Wat ik mezelf wijsmaak is waar.’ Wat jij jezelf wijsmaakt is een verhaal.’ Dit is een verhaal: jij, ik, het schroothuis, de schat.’ Dit is het echte leven.’ Hoe weet je dat?’ Niemand zou er ooit voor betalen om ernaar te kijken.’ Ze draaide zich om om het haveloze huis weer binnen te gaan. Toen draaide ze zich weer om naar mij. En ik zou er alles voor over hebben om het niet te hoeven le¬ven.’ Je moet het niet leven. Je moet het veranderen.' 'Je begrijpt het niet, hè?’ Wat begrijp ik niet?’ Dit is het echte leven.

We think of ourselves as close and finite, when we are multiple and infinite.

We are our own oral history. A living memoir of time.

If there’s nothing there, you can invent something. You won’t be able to bear the emptiness. It will still be empty, but you’ll tell yourself it’s not.

Ali is not telling stories, but that the stories are telling him. As he knots himself into a history that never happened and a future that cannot have happened, he is like a cross-legged Turk who knots a fine carpet and finds himself in the pattern. As Ali knots himself into time, he has wondered if St Augustine might be right. A Catholic, who taught Ali to read, taught him that St Augustine had said that the universe was not created in time but with time.

What he doesn’t know, really doesn’t know, is where he begins and the stories end. How can he know? The people who think they know define reality according to what is obvious and advise Ali to do the same. He would, gladly, but while what is obvious to them is also obvious to him, what is obvious to him is not obvious to them.

What he is, what he invents, becomes part of the same story, one continuous story, where even birth and death are only markers, pauses, changes of tempo. Birth and death become new languages, that is all. The obvious people shake their heads, and say that when Ali is in his grave, that will be an end to his stories and an end to him. Will it? Or will it be a shift to other mouths and other tales, while Ali, with his tale in his mouth, rolls on?

Perhaps this is how it is—life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.

I wanted to make a slot in time. To use time fully I use it vertically. One life is not enough. I use the past as a stalking horse to come nearer to my quarry.

Did I write this story, or was it you, writing through me, the way the sun sparks the fire through a piece of glass?

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love’s nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love’s fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

Like all familiar objects it had become invisible.

I can’t be an exile from my own past.

If you’ll give up your past, I’ll give up mine,

he was honey in my mouth as I kissed him.

There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Like other exiles, her longing grew a narrative of its own. Her desire told itself as memory. Her past was a place that none of us could visit without her. It was the only kingdom she could control.

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run.

A relationship where one person has no power or negative power isn’t a relationship, it’s the bond between master and slave.

I think it’s fair to say that my parents were not loved as children, that they did not love each other and that they did not love me.

Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. Love’s exquisite happiness is also love’s exquisite pain. I do not seek pain but there is pain. I do not seek suffering but there is suffering.

There’s no effort which is not beautiful—lifting a heavy stone or loving you.

Follow it. The buried treasure is really there. What exists and what might exist are windowed together at the core of reality. All the separations and divisions and blind alleys and impossibilities that seem so central to life are happening at its outer edges. If I could follow the map further and if I could refuse the false endings (the false starts don’t matter), I could find the place where time stops. Where death stops. Where love is. Beyond time, beyond death, love is. Time and death cannot wear it away. I love you.

... his heart was as unformed by kindness as his body had been neglected by beauty.

... he lashed his dogs and his whores with the same strap.

To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

Sex and death belong together, joined in our imaginations as they are in our DNA. Sex and death are our original parents. For some of us, the only family we’ll ever have.