Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it's more about losing a sense of family. The horror of that kind of incompleteness. Writing this book, I tried not to think about my father, which does no one any good fictionally. I did try to imagine not just the horror of that moment, but the horror of having witnessed it, and the lifelong void. And I think that's what's so frightening.

I was adopted legally around age three, but it's not like this thing I think about when I wake up every day. I was adopted by my foster parents, so I was comfortable with them. I wasn't in this alien place.

There are so many times there could have been a left turn instead of a right turn in all people's lives. I think mine are pretty crystal clear, because of being adopted, being born in Ethiopia, being adopted to Sweden.

The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.

I came into this environment where there was so much love, so much positive energy. I never heard my parents say, 'We have adopted kids.' The minute my sister Linda and I landed in Sweden, we were their kids.

I wanted to acknowledge my U.S. heritage and to belong to it more closely. Having said that, I am certainly British by formation and education and readily think of London as home. I had never lived in the U.S. till 2007.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

I've never read one book about my father.

I'll always be grateful for 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.' It brought me many, many, readers.

'MotherFatherSon' was just an extraordinary read and I wanted to be a part of it.

I keep my Scottish connection. I know where I was born, and that's an important part of my history, and I think all immigrants are the same. But if I could live anywhere in the world, it would be Australia.

When I came to Australia in 1987 as an adoptee from India, I could not have had any idea where my life journey would take me.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.

You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.

If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.

Books wind into the heart.

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.

...for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered.

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

Once a book falls into our possession, it is ours, the same way children lay their claim: 'That's my book.' As if it were organically part of them. That must be why we have so much trouble returning borrowed books. It's not exactly theft (of course not, we're not thieves, what are you implying?); it's simply a slippage in ownership or, better still, a transfer of substance. That which belonged to someone else becomes mine when I look at it. And if I like what I read, naturally I'll have difficulty giving it back.

I must have been about 11 when I read the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I read, over and over again.

Read! When your baby is finally down for the night, pick up a juicy book like Eat, Pray, Love or Pride and Prejudice or my personal favorite,Understanding Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy and Apnea; A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my "plan" was for taking down the Christmas tree.

I brought home a baby without telling [husband John McCain], and he not only took it in stride but loved it, immediately embracing Bridget, who shares John's very dry sense of humor, so she and her dad do pretty well together. If I hadn't taken Bridget out, I think she would have become a prostitute or worse, died.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.