It is time enough that I indulge you in the divine decadence that is the prose of Jeanette Winterson.

I was first introduced to Winterson my senior year of high school by my English teacher. He was crazy about her, possessed by a spirit that too would come for me. I didn’t know it yet, but I would come to credit her words to saving my life for reasons divulged here.

I simply fell in love.

Her writing was so unlike anything I had ever encountered. Her characters eccentric, her stories beautifully unpredictable. Here is a writer who showed me the power of fiction, who paved the way for me to choose the very thing I would dedicate the next four years to studying, the thing I would then dedicate my life to loving. In other words, here is someone who has played a leading role in determining the course of my existence. This is something of how.

THE PASSION (1987)

This was the first book of hers that I read during the fever dream that was my seventeenth year. It deals with a love triangle, set during the Napoleonic Wars. It draws a thought-provoking parallel between love and gambling, where what you risk reveals what you value. It deals with the pain of loving people that you cannot have and the way in which it is often that love that marks us for the rest of our lives. The heart, and who you give yours to, becomes a wrenching symbol throughout the novel. Beautifully written, it left me scrawling several pages of quotes that I still read to this day, quotes that remind me of what it felt like to be a teenager falling in love for the first time, before anything had a chance to make any sense at all. Here are a painfully select few of those:

“We are a lukewarm people and our longing for freedom is our longing for love. If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.”

“I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.”

“What you risk reveals what you value.”

“We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.”

“We gamble with the hope of winning, but it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us.”

“Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.”

“I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.”

WRITTEN ON THE BODY (1992)

Entangled within my own dizzying love triangle my senior year, this book gutted me. It’s perhaps my favorite. Told from the perspective of a gender neutral narrator, it accounts the experience of falling in love with someone that you cannot have and all of the pain and beauty and heartbreak that goes with it. There is an obsession with the body, with how it functions and how it fails. There is a raw, aching realness that permeates each character, taking the novel away from any romantic plot you have known and into a realm that is entirely it’s own. It’s heavily saturated with poetic prose and universal truths that feel like punches in the gut. She concocts several extended metaphors, telling the experience of love through the human body. There are chapters titled “The Skin” and “The Skeleton” where she weaves scientific fact into abstract theory. Here are some candy quotes to suck on:

“[I love You] you were careful not to say those words…I had said them many times before, dropping them like coins into a wishing well, hoping they would make me come true.”

“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”

“Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”

“Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.”

“I love you and my love for you makes any other life a lie.”

“i will find a clue, I will be able to unravel you, pull you between my fingers and stretch out each thread to know the measure of you.”

“But molecules and the human beings that they are a part of exist in a universe of possibility. We touch one another, bond and break, drift away on force-fields we don’t understand.”

“Love is not something you can negotiate.”

GUT SYMMETRIES (1997)

Reading this feels like sitting on the surface of mars, looking down at yourself and all of the messy love that you try to carry on earth. An astronomy nerd through no fault of my own, the metaphorical language Winterson employs is simply orgasmic. I used to listen to podcasts about the death and life of stars and even took several astronomy courses, as an English major, for no reason other than to witness the poetry that is all seemed to exude. And then here is Winterson explicitly combining the two. She interlocks astrophysics with poetic prose to tell the story of yet another love triangle. “GUT” in the title references “grand unified theories”, hinting at the abstract complexities in which both Winterson and her characters grapple with throughout the pages. It’s fun because the acronym provides a kind of answer in that, when it comes to the incomprehensible ideas and questions of life, your gut is all you truly have. Narratively, it deals with the marriage of Jove, an elite physicist, his wife Stella, and the relationships that Alice, another physicist, separately forms with each of them. Naturally, it contains some of the most profound and unusual quotes I have read. Here are a few:

“Breathe in, breathe out. You breathe time and time’s decay…but damned or saved, what we were continues in the lungs of each other. Nitrogen, oxygen, tell-tale carbon…Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. History is in your nostrils.”

“To vow yourself to someone else is to open a wound. From it blood flows freely, life of you to them…The vow of me to you and you to me is a red vulnerability on a grey shuttered world. We risk ourselves for each other…here is the knife that kills me in your hand. To prove it I let the blood myself…I shall give it to you, a ceremony of innocence made knowing in blood…we transfused each other.”

“He stood at the end of the world and poured the sea into space. The glittering fish were stars.”

“To howl out the plain fact that there is no comfort, no relief, that grief must be endured until it has exhausted itself on me.”

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

“She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.”

“The expanse of us, unhindered…Stars in your eyes, the infinity of you…the much of you was more than I dared hope for…You were the one who taught me the aerodynamics of risk.”

“The human condition seems to be one of waiting to be rescued. Will it be you? Will it be today?”

“We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. If was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it.”

THE WORLD AND OTHER PLACES (1998)

I found this gem over the weekend at a local used bookstore and feel obligated to spill its delicious secrets despite having only just begun. Unlike the aforementioned works of art, this one is not a novel, but a collection of essays. In keeping with tradition, the ones I have read thus far deal with random and eccentric moments of life that she brilliantly extracts deep meaning from. The opening essay is about a puppy, but she writes about that puppy with such poetic reverence that you would think it were god. That’s her style. I swear she could write about a stalk of celery lying in a gutter and I would be moved. It’s just magnetic. Here are some little magnets I pulled from the first chapter:

“I made him walk on a lead and he jumped for joy, the way creatures do, and children do and adults don’t do, and spend their lives wondering where the leap went…He orbited me. He was a universe of play.”

“This was the edge of time, between chaos and shape.”

“Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.”

“It would have been so much easier if I had been an easier person. We were so many edges, dog and me, and of the same recklessness. And of the same love. I have learned what love costs. I never count it but I know what it costs.”

For more of Jeanette Winterson, check out what Maria Popova has written here.

JOIN THE FUN

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.