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The Powerbook QUOTES

The Powerbook QUOTES

1 " You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

I said I was afraid of not living.

I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

2 " ...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

3 " There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that.

There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you.

Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance? "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

4 " There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

5 " The past is magnetic. It draws us in. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

6 " History is a madman's museum. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

7 " Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

8 " The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

9 " There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

10 " This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

11 " I can change the story. I am the story. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

12 " I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

13 " When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

14 " There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

15 " In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

16 " What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

17 " There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

18 " I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

19 " The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two? "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook

20 " Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. "

― Jeanette Winterson , The Powerbook