Jeanette Winterson!

“There’s a painting I love called The Sowers, by Van Gogh. A peasant walks home at evening with a huge yellow moon behind him. The land is strong and certain, made of thick colours laid on with a palette knife. It comforts me because it makes me think that the world will always be here, strong and certain, at the end of a day, at the end of a journey. Brown fields and a yellow moon.“

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

“But when we’ve been everywhere, and it’s only a matter of time, where will we go next, when there are no more wildernesses?“

There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss.

There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss.

I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. 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. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are.

I went into churches because they were built from the heart. Improbable hearts that I had never understood before. Hearts so full of longing that these old stones still cry out with their ecstasy.

What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.

And my desire? Infinite space.

“It was not judgement day, but another morning.”

“Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. 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.”

“He said that the sea is so vast no one will ever finish sailing it. That every mapped-out journey contains another journey hidden in its lines…“

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”

“My companion, though she told me it was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet in a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the tiniest amount I may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until someone sets it free.”