Jeanette Winterson Quotes

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I loved to read books in the free world, and there was a lot of time to sit around and do nothing in prison. When you read, it opens up your mind; it helped us take our minds away from where we were.

When books are opened, we discover that we have wings

I can't imagine I could have become the person I am now without books. Books became synonymous with freedom. They showed that you could open doors and walk through.

Education is freedom.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.

I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

When you know your self-worth, and you read and you ask questions and you study and you travel, you become free.

From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.

Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.

And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

I believe in the importance of seeking self-knowledge. The more I know myself, the more I feel empowered.

Books were my pass to personal freedom.

We are getting older, and we are getting wiser, and we are getting freer. And when you get the wisdom and the truth, then you get the freedom and you get power, and then look out. Look out.

A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.

There is some liberation in the freedom of being totally alone and really going for it.