Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I want to try to not be the child that had to go through too much too young. I want to be who I am now and not who I was then.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

What happened to me in Somalia doesn't define me.

I took some of the hardest things about my life and wrote an empowering song with it. It has made me want to always write from that place.

If something hurtful enters your body, you create something beautiful to protect yourself from it. That's my philosophy.

If you can keep something very personal, like a song, like a color, like a story, deep in your heart, then nobody can destroy that. Nobody can destroy your imagination; nobody can destroy your love.

We need creativity. We need more poetry after Auschwitz.

Life has to keep going, so you can either be a victim the rest of your life and let it drag you down into drugs and alcohol and depression or you can turn it into something good, fun even, you know, and I tell young people who are going through depression that this might be the most important time of your life. This might be what makes you a great artist later on.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

I survived this torture which left me paralyzed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violence through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability.

Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back.

Be proud of your scars. They have everything to do with your strength, and what you've endured. They're a treasure map to the deep self.

Sometimes you have to explore the darkness to get to the light and get back to who you are.

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

I went through a struggle, and I really needed to get myself together and connect with my purpose, which is music.

I'm still me even after all that's happened.

I'm a creative person who had a lot of dark time in my life. I can still get to it: I can still go to a relationship or a time when things weren't great. But it's getting further and further from me.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

I like words. Words are places, rooms, distant airs, thin and tropical. They make us feel and imagine we are more than our bodies.

I probably wouldn't be a songwriter if I didn't grow up the way I did. It was difficult and it was at times very scary to grow up in a household so unsettled and at times very violent. But, it also, I guess it earned me a sort of wisdom at a young age that's served me well.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.