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"It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction."
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"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

"I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing."

"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."

"Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions."

"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy."

"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."

"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."
Explore more quotes by Jeanette Winterson

"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."

"St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry."

"There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that."

"I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings."

"Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris."

"You'll get over it. It's the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don't get over it because it is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you, and no one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?"

"Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue."
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