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Sexing the Cherry QUOTES

Sexing the Cherry QUOTES

1 " As your lover describes you, so you are. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

2 " The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

3 " Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

4 " The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world? "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

5 " It is a true saying, that what you fear you find. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

6 " For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

7 " I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

8 " Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

9 " When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.

Jordan...

I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

10 " the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

11 " That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

12 " Singing is my pleasure, but not in church, for the parson said the gargoyles must remain on the outside, not seek room in the choir stalls. So I sing inside the mountain of my flesh, and my voice is as slender as a reed and my voice has no lard in it. When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have been. But does it matter if the place cannot be mapped as long as I can still describe it? "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

13 " Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

14 " When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

15 " At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

16 " Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

17 " I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

18 " …I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

19 " Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry

20 " I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherry