Jeanette Winterson Quotes

In general, when you travel, you get into a different reality and are able to more accurately reflect on your ordinary life. Hiking does that for me.

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.

Even when I'm older, I might be in a different head space, but I want to be able to go back to 'True 2 Myself' and remember this season. It's really for me.

As I look back over my life, I've been an active person - obviously I was self-absorbed for a period of time.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

I look at the past and I see myself.

It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

It's very odd, being older, because in a way it's hard to own the past, even.

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead.

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.

'Looper' is about what your 55-year-old self would tell your 25-year-old self over a cup of coffee. It's about finding love in the third act of your life. It's about overcoming trauma and the idea of true sacrifice.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

I can't stand that - those women in 'Waiting to Exhale' now. I can't stand them. But that's because I'm 53 and not 33. But what they were experiencing at 33, I identified with it.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.

A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden.

I have a photograph of myself when I was 2 years of age, and I don't recognize the person in the photograph. She doesn't look anything like me, and I can't find any trace of her in me physically. And yet I remember her very, very well - even her anxiety.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.