Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
23 quotes
"Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more."
"Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way."
"History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing."
"The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.Or the people who found Atlantis."
"Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently"
"I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons."
"If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind."
"They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad."
"There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss."
"Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different."
"I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body."
"There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have been confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out."
"If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes."
"There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it."
"What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?"
"Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently."
"...to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist."
"People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe."
"By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's."
"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."
"If the demons lived anywhere it was here."
"I came to this city to escape."
"We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it."