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"They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad."
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"Every crag and gnarled tree and lonely valley has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it."

"Wrath: look at how their folklore portrays our species. There's Dracula for Christ's sake, an evil bloodsucker who preys on the defenseless. There's piss-poor B movies and porn. And don't get me started on the whole Halloween thing. Plastic fangs. Black capes. The only thing the idiots got right are that we drink blood and that we can't go out in daylight. The rest is bullshit, fabricated to alienate us and stimulate fear in the masses. Or just as offensive, the fiction used to create some kind of mystique for bored humans who think the dark side is a fun place to visit."

"I dinna want to disappoint ye, but we's in a cellar right here, and it's full o' tatties.'After a while a voice said: 'So where izzit?''Maybe it's got the day off?''What's a demon need a day off for?''Tae gae an' see its ol' mam an' dad, mebbe?''Oh, aye? Demons have mams, do they?"

"Some people will tell you werewolves can only shapechange under a full moon, but people also say there's no such things as ghosts."

"They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad."
Explore more quotes by Jeanette Winterson

"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."

"Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know."

"Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets."

"You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you."

"You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?"

"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."

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

"There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name."

"He: What's the matter with you?Me: Nothing.Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her."
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