"I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging."

"The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied."

"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect."

"There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it."

"After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, "I fuck therefore I am"."

"Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything."

"I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should."

"And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives."

"Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know."

"As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us."

"Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you."

"In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey."

"Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing."

"I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher."

"I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness."

"Happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you."

"Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes."

"Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?"

"I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me."

"It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language."

"A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under."

"Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun."

"The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear."

"She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice."

"Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."

"When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation....When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities."

"There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case."

"There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value."

"There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up."

"I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed."

"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."

"In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance."

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

"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."

"She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, 'It's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.' That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear. She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well-wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, 'She's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.'This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the 'dead' part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended."

"If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going."

"My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, "David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat."

"Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out."

"What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for."

"I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical."

"Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different."

"Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?"

"Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels."

"She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing."

"Naked is the best disguise."

"I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older."

"I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject."

"There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand."

"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?"

"Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned, it was a conspiracy of ignorance."