Jeanette Winterson

"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."

"We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment."

"One thing you notice about progress, kid, is that it doesn't happen to everyone."

"The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home."

"Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)."

"You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own."

"If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes."

"In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.Feeling is frightening."

"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."

"If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind."

"I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body."

"I want to touch you.''And if you did touch me, what then?''I would find a language of beginning."