Memoirists From England

"To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession."

"The dead may speak the truth only, even when it discredits themselves."

"Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) Motive and end and moral in the air; Nice contradiction between fact and fact Will make the whole read human and exact."

"His wiles were witty and his fame far known, Every king's daughter sought him for her own, Yet he was nothing to be won or lost. All lands to him were Ithaca: love-tossed He loathed the fraud, yet would not bed alone."

"One, two and many: flesh had made him blind, Flesh had one pleasure only in the act, Flesh set one purpose only in the mind — Triumph of flesh and afterwards to find Still those same terrors wherewith flesh was racked."

"They multiplied into the Sirens' throng, Forewarned by fear of whom he stood bound fast Hand and foot helpless to the vessel's mast, Yet would not stop his ears: daring their song He groaned and sweated till that shore was past."

"To the much-tossed Ulysses, never done With woman whether gowned as wife or whore, Penelope and Circe seemed as one: She like a whore made his lewd fancies run, And wifely she a hero to him bore."

"Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame That at the whisper of Love’s name, Or Beauty’s, presto! up you raise Your angry head and stand at gaze?"

"Children, if you dare to think Of the greatness, rareness, muchness, Fewness of this precious only Endless world in which you say You live, you think of things like this: Blocks of slate enclosing dappled Red and green, enclosing tawny Yellow nets, enclosing white And black acres of dominoes, Where a neat brown paper parcel Tempts you to untie the string."

"Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head, Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood, That shivering glory not to be despised. Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark — a shining space With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace."

"As you are woman, so be lovely: As you are lovely, so be various, Merciful as constant, constant as various, So be mine, as I yours for ever."

"There’s a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility."

"His eyes are quickened so with grief, He can watch a grass or leaf Every instant grow; he can Clearly through a flint wall see, Or watch the startled spirit flee From the throat of a dead man."

"Christ of His gentleness Thirsting and hungering, Walked in the wilderness; Soft words of grace He spoke Unto lost desert-folk That listened wondering."

"Trench stinks of shallow buried dead Where Tom stands at the periscope, Tired out. After nine months he’s shed All fear, all faith, all hate, all hope."

"If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of a man who desrves them."

"Even nowadays an archaic sense of love-innocence recurs, however briefly, among most young men and women. Some few of these, who become poets, remain in love for the rest of their lives, watching the world with a detachment unknown to lawyers, politicians, financiers, and all other ministers of that blind and irresponsible successor to matriarchy and patriarchy — the mechanarchy."

"Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality."

"Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identity and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views."

"A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end."

"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good."

"As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress."

"My immediate instinct when faced with the questions from The Mail on Sunday ten days ago was to protect my family's privacy and particularly my son in his first term at university, living away from home."

"It is not fair to Tony or to the Government that the entire focus of political debate at the moment is about me. I know I'm in a very special position, I'm the wife of the Prime Minister, I have an interesting job and a wonderful family, but I also know I am not Superwoman. The reality of my daily life is that I'm juggling a lot of balls in the air. Some of you must experience that."

"For many women, becoming a widow does not just mean the heartache of losing a husband, but often losing everything else as well. In too many countries, a woman who is widowed becomes in effect a non-person. Through no fault of her own, she can suffer social discrimination, stigma and even violence, sometimes, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, being forced to “cleanse” herself by having sexual intercourse with a relative or stranger."

"Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be;"

"Jeanette Winterson once asked her adoptive mother — stringently immortalised in her first novel ' — why they couldn't have books in the house. "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late," answered the peerless Mrs Winterson. As advertisements for reading go, it's pretty seductive. But it also happens to be wonderfully true of this vivid, unpredictable and sometimes mind-rattling memoir. You start it expecting one thing — a wry retake of her gothic upbringing – and come out having been subjected to one of the more harrowing and candid investigations of mid-life breakdown I've ever read. This book is definitely of the sort that Mrs Winterson feared most: truths that most of us find hard to face, explored in a way that disturb, challenge, upset and inspire. And so yes, by the time I realised what it was really about and what it was going to do to me, it was definitely far "too late"."

"When Jeanette Winterson discussed ' at the Guardian book club, we could not get away from the responses of one particular reader. The reaction of the novelist's adoptive mother, "Mrs Winterson", was still alive in her memory. "She was livid". In a pre-arranged conversation down the line from London to a in , Winterson had tried to explain "it's not about us in any real way". Her mother was not having any of it. "It's the first time I've had to order a book in a false name." Perhaps she would have come to accept the novel, but it would have taken more years than she had left. (Weirdly enough, Winterson told us, she actually died while watching the second episode of the .) In the book, the narrator's unnamed mother is never stumped for a response to the world's ungodly ways. So too in life, as she d to her daughter's new-found success as an author: "Jeanette, why be happy when you could be normal?""

"Would it be too much to read Winterson’s Christmas collection as an attempt, finally, to make peace and come to terms with her past? The evidence is there in the inclusion of the for her father’s favorite , which she made out of tinned fruit and only a few days before he died."

"The book that made me want to write was The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. It made me feel that historical fiction didn’t have to be fusty and all about bodices, that it could be a thrilling novel, which just happened to be set in 1800."

"Born in Manchester in 1959, Winterson was given up for adoption, and her primary parental figure became her adoptive mother, whom Winterson almost always refers to as Mrs. Winterson. A zealot, Mrs. Winterson forbade her daughter books, scolded her for being “born bad” and saw the world “as a battleground between good and evil.” The author, who would come out as a lesbian at age 16 and escape this suffocating household, explored her upbringing, to great acclaim, in her 1985 debut novel, “,” and again in her more exacting 2011 memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” Mrs. Winterson haunts this newest work too, as a sultan of sorts, a powerful and intimate overlord her daughter must best."

""Why be happy when you could be normal?" Constance Winterson, adoptive mother of Jeanette Winterson."

"I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything– the miracle– is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves. (p.31)"

"There are more than two chances– many more. 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. (p.38)"

"He smiled."

"He's the kind of man who was born to rise and rise: a human elevator. (p.7)"

"Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a café, years ago."

"Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision."

"Tell me a story, Pew."

"It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do. (p. 199)"

"I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The Sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day. (p. 197)"

"I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. the world just pours it out."

"In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone."

"Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?"

"I am a glass man, but there is no light in me that can shine across the sea. I shall lead no one home, save no lives, not even my own."

"You say we are not one, you say truly there are two of us. Yes, there were two of us, but we were one. As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them."

"To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run."

"I felt as if I had blundered into someone else's life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story."

"Only the impossible is worth the effort."

"What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain."