Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I could not live with someone 24/7. I just never did, and I could never do.

I grew up in a two-bedroom house with my grandfather, my mom and dad and four kids. I slept on the couch or on the floor, and I always wanted to have my own space.

Sharing a room with one person is worse than sharing with six, and sharing with six is in some ways worse than sharing with sixty.

Wherever you have people, you have factions and disagreements and personality conflicts.

You can’t hate people unless you love them.

Marriage is such hard work. And it's full of rage and real human drama.

Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.

It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to be complicated. And love is always complicated. But humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

I love my fellow creatures - I do all the good I can - yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!

What woman wants to go home with a guy that lives with his mother?

Most human beings still cannot trust love.

I think the one reason that writers marry other writers - one of the reasons that I married another writer - was, I fell in love with that writer. But second of all, I had been married before and a source of marital strife was me needing to go away for a couple of weeks to write or it's Saturday and I think I just need to work today and not hang out with you.

It makes me sad when I see artists who come alive when they go onstage, because, gee, I really come alive when I'm home.

...Sometimes I dream that everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly, and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness- and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

As small as a world as large as alone.

There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.

Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.

It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those we want to love.

I think any relationship that is normal - I mean, there's no normal relationship, but in terms of a flawed relationship, there's always gonna be awkward moments within that because you're addressing things that the world is throwing at you, whether that's distance or whether that's where this is going or other people and past relationships, all these factors.

At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, it's usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them. The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.

The saddest thing was actually getting fed up with one another. It's like growing up in a family. When you get to a certain age, you want to go off and get your own girl and your own car, split up a bit.

When I shared a room with my sister Trisha, we drew a line down the middle. She had Laura Ashley stuff with flowers everywhere, and her whole side of the room was white, while my side of the room was painted, freaky and covered with stuff.

Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.