Jeanette Winterson Quotes

The future is meant for those who are willing to let go of the worst parts of the past. When you cannot take two steps without turning around to inspect your footsteps, you are getting nowhere fast.

Even though you've given up a past it hasn't given you up. It comes uninvited - and sometimes half welcome.

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.

What people say doesn't really matter. It's best to just brush it off and move on.

The past is never where you think you left it.

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?

In the denial of that disorder there is order.

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.

I wasn't ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, "I'm so glad that's over. Nothing can ever be as bad again," without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.

You develop relationships with people, and suddenly a family of actors and crew that you became so close to are now not around anymore. I'm not too sad about it because I got to move on to something else, but it's sad the way these things turn out.

Don't beat yourself up over what you could have or should have done. The past is gone. Move on to the future.

Everyone can of course take their own meaning, that's the beauty of music and lyrics, but to me it seems like everything is about being attached to the past and being afraid of moving forward, afraid of that big dive or step and losing what was.

Things past redress are now with me past care

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

That nothing - not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state - will make the past disappear.

There are times when I wish I could go back and change the course of my life. Make different choices...But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on. Do you remember that I told you that at Spence?

The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.

Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity.

I myself am more and more inclined to agree with Omar and Satchel Paige as I grow older: Don't try to rewrite what the moving finger has writ, and don't ever look over your shoulder.

You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, 'Oh yes, I remember how that feels.' But you can't.

The work changes the way your face changes and ages - it just does. Also, I have very little connection to anything I've written. I move on. We all move on

For we lose not only by death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on.

I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to loose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn't mine, and at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news.

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.