Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

"Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

"The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own."

"A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?"

"She was a monster, but she was my monster."

"The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.''Then what happens' asked the junior, rather overawed.'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course—as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness."

"The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille."

"I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse. I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live."

"A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough."

"The true nature of the world is energy not mass."

"She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice."

"I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex."

"Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear... Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world."

"Our contradictions are never so to ourselves."

"Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation."

"She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, 'It's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.' That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear. She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well-wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, 'She's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.'This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the 'dead' part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended."

"Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way."

"When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say."

"Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say."

"...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you."

"We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't."