Jeanette Winterson Quotes

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?

I am nothing but I must be everything.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

The big problem of any young person's life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, 'Man is the sick animal.' Man is the animal that doesn't know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves?

When there's trouble I don't like running, but I'm afraid I got more in common with who I was, than who I am becoming

I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem: 'What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it?'

I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.

I don't know what I am. And it's not important.

Sometimes I wake up and think, 'How did I get here?'

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

I was actually looking for answers where I kept asking myself - what am I doing?

I had money, but I still didn't know what to do with my life.

As we wrestle with questions of identity, we imitate those actions we think best fill an ambiguity we have within ourselves. And that goes for everyone; no one is free from this condition.

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then

Oh my god what am I doing with my life?

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.