Jeanette Winterson Quotes

All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

[His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.

In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood

Secrets are the blood of life. Every big thing is a secret, even when you know it, because you never know all of it. If you can know everything about anything, it is not worth knowing.

And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.

All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain site.

Books are yours, Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which, for a day of need, The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs. These hoards of truth you can unlock at will.

She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

A book is like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you brint to it.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding.

Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.

We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.

Librarians are hot. They have knowledge and power over their domain...It is no coincidence how many librarians are portrayed as having a passionate interior, hidden by a cool layer of reserve. Aren't books like that? On the shelf, their calm covers belie the intense experience of reading one. Reading inflames the soul. Now, what sort of person would be the keeper of such books?

Books seek us out. They slip themselves into our hands just at the time we are ready for a new self-concept.

You can't eat books, sweetheart.

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

We still have books because they are so brilliantly suited to the way human beings absorb information and at their best, they are among the most beautiful things we have.