Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we d... - Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

"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."

"Why is the measure of love loss?"

"I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance."

"A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is."