Quotes from Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping, Jeanette Winterson

"The world is nothing. Love formed it.
The world vanishes without trace.
What is left is love."

"Memory is not like the surface of the water - either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in the rock -- your trilobites, and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright."

"There’s always a woman somewhere, child; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good…then there is the woman you love."

"We know the world by and through our bodies. This is our lab; we can't experiment without it."

"Love is an unarmed intruder."

"I think of love as a force of nature -- as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies."

"Never rely on what you see. Not everything can be seen."

"There is so little life, and it is fraught with chance. We meet, we don't meet, we take the wrong turning and still bump into each other. We conscientiously choose the 'right road" and it leads nowhere."

"He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it."

" 'Why are you afraid?' I asked myself, because fear is at the bottom of everything, even love usually rests on fear. 'Why are you afraid, when whatever you do you will die anyway?' "

"He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psyhocis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.