Frankissstein Quotes

“I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I was never bored except in the company of others.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

That is why we invent stories, I said.

And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Humans will be like decayed gentry. We'll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We'll have a piece of land that we didn't look after very well called the planet. And we'll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We'll be fading aristocracy. We'll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We'll be Marie Antionette with no cake.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I would never pull down a church! I adore churches. It is what happens inside them that I detest.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“calling things by their right names is more than giving them an identity bracelet or a label, or a serial number. We summon a vision. Naming is power.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Sanity is the thread through the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Once cut, or unravelled, all that lies in wait are gloomy tunnels unfathomable by any map, and what hides there is a beast in human form, wearing our own face.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“The Future is Now. That annoys me because if the future is now, where is the present?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“They never say, I love you with all my kidneys. I love you with my liver. They never say, my gall bladder is yours and yours alone. No one says, she broke my appendix.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“All I am saying is that love is not exclusively human.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Isn't content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn't free-floating; it's enmeshed.

That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora--that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind--global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves--all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.

Nationalism is on the rise, I say.

He nods. That's a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I manage my own madness just as you do. And if my heart is broken it keeps beating. That is the strangeness of life.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Reality is water-soluble.

What we could see, the rocks, the shore, the trees, the boats on the lake, had lost their usual definition and blurred into the long grey of a week’s rain. Even the house, that we fancied was made of stone, wavered inside a heavy mist and through that mist, sometimes, a door or a window appeared like an image in a dream.

Every solid thing had dissolved into its watery equivalent.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Even our best endeavors turn against us. A loom that can do the work of eight men should free eight men from servitude. Instead, seven skilled men are put out of work to starve with their families, and one skilled man because the unskilled minder of the mechanical loom. What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I don't like the word 'extinction' - it is alarmist
That's because being wiped out is alarming, I said
Don't be so tabloid, said Victor. Think of it as accelerated evolution.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I don't want eternal life, I said. This life is trouble enough.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“We walked in silence. Nature can cancel thought. We needed to walk and there was nothing more to say.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Once out of the body you will be able to choose any form you like, and change it as often as you like. Animal, vegetable, mineral. The gods appeared in human form and animal form, and they changed others into trees or birds. Those were stories about the future. We have always known that we are not limited to the shape we inhabit.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“...our beings struggle in our bodies like light trapped in a jar, and our bodies struggle in this world as a beast of burden chafes its yoke, and this world itself hangs alone on its noose, strung among the indifferent stars.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces--sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I visited a manufactory in Manchester with my father. I saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness. The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Only in death may we be reunited with those we have lost. For myself, I do not seek death but neither do I fear that which will bring me peace.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I’m trans, and that means a lifetime of hormones. My life will likely be shorter and it’s likely I will be sicker as I get older. I keep my maleness intact with testosterone because my body knows it wasn’t born the way I want it to be. I can change my body but I can’t change my body’s reading of my body. The paradox is that I felt in the wrong body but for my body it was the right body. What I have done calms my mind and agitates my chemistry. Few people know what it’s like to live in this way.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“None can know the human mind. No, not if he read every thought man ever wrote. Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“It is not always possible to forgive oneself. And sometimes you make a choice to do something, knowing that you must do it, and that forgiveness is impossible.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story