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Description
One of the most audacious and provocative writers on either side of the Atlantic now gives readers a dazzling, arousing, and wise improvisation on art, Eros, language, and identity. "A series of intense, artful musings that are exhilarating and visionary. . . . Unsettling yet strangely... read more
Memorable Quotes
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“And if I were to say that I would care to turn the pages of that gentleman one by one, and to run my fingers down his margins, and to decipher his smooth spine, and to go on my knees to enjoy his lower titles, and to upturn that one long volume that he keeps so secret to himself, what would you say?”
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“The fatal combination of indulgence without feeling disgusts me. Strange to be both greedy and dead.”
Handel -
“For myself I prefer to hold my desires just out of reach of appetite, to keep myself honed and sharp. I want the keen edge of longing. It is so easy to be a brute and yet it has become rather fashionable. Is that the consequence of leaving your body to science? Of assuming another pill, another drug, another car, another pocket-sized home-movie station, a DNA transfer, or the complete freedom of choice that five hundred TV channels must bring, will make everything all right? Will soothe the nagging pain in the heart that the latest laser scan refuses to diagnose? The doctor's surgery is full of men and women who do not know why they are unhappy. 'Take this,' says the Doctor, 'you'll soon feel better,' They do feel better, because little by little, they cease to feel at all.”
Handel -
“We had to protect ourselves. We had to be careful of the body beneath. Protection always involves some sort of loss. Hold back, watch yourself, wrap up, look for cuts, mind the blood, don't exchange fluid, Now Wash Your Hands Please. The riskiest thing you can do is to be naked with another human being.”
Handel -
“Isn't it well known that nothing shocks us? That photographs of wretchedness that thirty years ago would have made us protest in the streets, now flicker by our eyes and we hardly see them? More vivid, more graphic, more pornographic even, is the newsman's brief. He must make us feel, but like a body punched and punched again, we take the blows and do not even notice the damage they have done. Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional sympathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over and push aside on our way home to watch the evening news? 'Terrible' you said at Somalia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Russia, China, the Indian earthquake, the American floods, and then you watched a quiz show or a film because there's nothing you can do, nothing you can do, and the fear and unease that such powerlessness brings, trails in its wash, a dead arrogance for the beggar on the bridge that you pas”
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“Every day, in my concultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription. Most common are the retired or fired businessmen who develop cancer. They come to me in broken health, in fear for their lives, and the phrase I hear first is 'I'm not the man I was.' As we talk it becomes clear that he is the man he has been always, yes, well-off, yes, respectable, but immature, without self-knowledge, a man without breadth or depth, but shielded from this lack by his work, by his slap-on-the-back-pals. Often, as we talk, he tells me that he has never liked his work, hates his family, or that he has lived for his work and that without is he is a child again and what should he do in the mornings?”
Handel -
“It's awkward in a society where the cult of the individual has never been preached with greater force, and where many of our collective ills are a result of that force, to say that it is to the Self to which one must attend. But the Self is not a random collection of stray desires striving to be satisfied, nor is it only by suppressing such desires, as women are encouraged to do, that any social cohesion is possible. Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. 'What do you do?' is the party line, where doing is a substitute for being, and where the shame of not doing wipes away the thin chalk outline that sketches Husband Wife Banker Actor even Thief. It's comforting, my busy life, left alone with my own thoughts I might find I have none. And left to my own emotions? Is there much beyond a childish rage and the sentimentality that passes for love?”
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“The most awkward fact in all this doubt is this: remembering, which occurs now, at this split second, does not prove that what is being remembered actually occurred at some other time. I may be convinced that it did, especially is a number of others, the more the better, are convinced too. When I am alone, and the experience, the emotion, the event, was mine and mine alone, how can I say for certain that I have not invented the entire episode, including the faithful memory of it?”
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“Pantophobia. Fear of everything. Fear of everything keeps me sealed up against everything. I fear the coloured world on my neutral body. I fear the bright red sun and grass matt green. I fear the cows whose black hides reflect purple. I fear the brimming blue that bees love. I fear the thirteen yellows and the madness of Van Gogh. I fear the sunflower, the straw chair and the boots donkey brown. Every moment intensity collects on the tip of experience and leaves collect rain. The moment swells, bursts, is gone, and passes unnoticed. Intensity dripping away, the moment gone. Isn't that the science of life?”
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“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?”
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“In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch the light off and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top with the phone saying 'Yes, I'm fine, of course I'm fine, everything's fine.' The trunks shudder.”
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“Is apetite excess of feeling or lack of it? The glutton is not a gourmand. The alcoholic does not love fine wine any more than the womanizer loves women. Don Giovanni; the unsheathed cock is layered to numbness. He might as well stick it in a hole in the wall for all the pleasure it gives him. Sex gives him no pleasure, only power and violence please him, that is not the mark of the brute, it is the mark of Man. When I say I lack feeling, you know that I mean I lack the capacity to feel, and is a spiritual not a bodily failing.”
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“Shame comes from an older and different moral sense, where the wrong-doer does not fear punishment, either in this world or the next, but fears that shrinking up of self, the loss that any small, mean, dirty or stupid act, charges to the soul. If I cheat another, I cheat myself out of the person that I could be. If I wound another, I will eventually find the cut recalled to my own heart. There is no appropriate confession, only the will not to fail again so readily, perhaps because while failure can be forgiven it cannot be excused.”
First Sentence
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Authors & Contributors
- Jeanette Winterson (Author)
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