Jeanette Winterson Quotes

You fall in love, and it completely consumes you.

I myself have loved a lady and pursued her with a great deal of under-age protestation, whom some three or four gallants that have enjoyed would with all their hearts have been glad to have been rid of. 'Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.

He wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it.

It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.

In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.

How I waited for you! How I longed for you! he stammered. "I thought of you all the time. I saw you all the time. Your smile was everywhere." He lowered his voice and added, "Sometimes when people were talking commonplaces and your name happened to be mentioned, It would go through my heart like an electric current.

I never saw so sweet a face. As that I stood before. My heart has left it dwelling place ... and can return no more.

The song Venus de Milo, the whole subject of it is Love is a drug.

Love is the hardest habit to break, and the most difficult to satisfy.

Falling in love as we know it is an addictive experience.

We were both in love with him. I fell out of love with him, but he didn't.

The moment I first heard love I gave up my soul, my heart, and my eyes.

But no one frees himself from being in love in three days.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart.

For love is no part of the dreamworld. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.

Love is the use one makes of another.

He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.

I know the woman has no soul, I know The woman has no possibilities Of soul or mind or heart, but merely is The masterpiece of flesh: well, be it so. It is her flesh that I adore; I go Thirsting afresh to drain her empty kiss. I know she cannot love: it is not this My vanquished heart implores in overthrow. Tyrannously I crave, I crave alone, Her splendid body, Earth's most eloquent Music, divinest human harmony; Her body now a silent instrument, That 'neath my touch shall wake and make for me The strains I have but dreamed of, never known.

O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.

By my soul, I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep; nor, what's still worse, love any woman in the world but her.

But she had dreamed of being his for too long. He had quite ruined her for a marriage of convenience. She wanted everything from him: his mind, his body, his name and, most of all, his heart.

Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.

Love, however, cannot be forbidden. The more that flame is covered up, the hotter it burns. Also love can always find a way. It was impossible that these two whose hearts were on fire should be kept apart. (Pyramus and Thisbe)