“ Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“ What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“ Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“ In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“ It’s a visitor’s privilege to be foolish.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“ But the rags and ribbons turn to years and then the years are gone.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“ Fiction needs its specifics, its anchors. It needs also to pass beyond them. It needs to be weighed down with characters we can touch and know, it needs also to fly right through them into a larger, universal space. This paradox makes work readable and durable, from its impossible tension, something harmonious is born.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in the Introduction
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“ I really don’t see the point of reading in straight lines. We don’t think like that and we don’t live like that. Our mental processes are closer to a maze than a motorway, every turning yields another turning, not symmetrical, not obvious. Not chaos either. A sophisticated mathematical equation made harder to unravel because X and Y have different values on different days.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in the Introduction
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