Women Academics From England

"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

"Older children always sit down to paint or write after they have seen a picture or read a story that appeals to them, and attempt to create. So life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilise the soul and lead to the conception of new, glorious things. To avoid the ordeal of emotion that leads to the conception is the impulse of death. Sterility is the deadly sin. Today so many of our activities are sterile. Our upper classes are impotent by reason of their soft living. Our lower classes have had their vitality sweated out of them by their filthy labours: they can only bear dead things."

"Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse."

"Socialism is not a bomb thrown at the natural institution of society, but a well-considered medicine for a diseased community."

"There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped."

"Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it."

"No single form or genre was sufficient to contain her energy, and she lived as hard as she wrote. Rebecca West went everywhere, read everything, knew everyone. As Bonnie Kime Scott says in her editor’s introduction, "To read her letters in an informed way is to receive an education in the culture of the twentieth century.""

"It is not an exaggeration if one claims that The Strange Necessity and The Common Reader of Virginia Woolf are the two finest volumes of literary criticism written by women in the English language."

"Rebecca [West] is an extremely clever young woman whose critical writings in the papers have been startling everyone for the last few years. Rebecca can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could, and much more savagely."

"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"."

"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."

"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."

""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)"

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

"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)"

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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?""

"Tell me a story, Pew."

"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)"

"He smiled."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Only the impossible is worth the effort."

"What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable."

"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."

"Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream."

"The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests."

"They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty - even for a moment - it is enough."

"If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much in use for it."

"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?"

"In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now."

"When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not."

"My heart returns to me what I turn away. I am my own master but not always master of myself."

"Why is the measure of love... loss? pg.9"

"There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream."

"That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the worlds tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves. (p.13)"

"No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value."

"Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle."

"Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate. (p.74)"

"In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable."

"What you risk reveals what you value. (p.91)"

"We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void...For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night? (p.57)"

"Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play. (p.73)"