Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it's a lie.

Fantasy and reality often overlap.

You see, if you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

The realist lies for advantage. The fantasist lies to give his dreams a flavor of reality.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

People like what is not true and they don't like what is true.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.

Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

To visualize is to see what is not there, what is not real - a dream. To visualize is, in fact, to make visual lies. Visual lies, however, have a way of coming true.

Only fools imagine they are already awake. How clearly they understand everything! How easily they distinguish this deception from that reality!

Your harshest truths are dreams, and your gentlest dreams are true.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.

Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight. Mercutio: And so did I. Romeo: Well, what was yours? Mercutio: That dreamers often lie. Romeo: In bed asleep while they do dream things true.

...It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine.

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to hime make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.