Women Academics From England

"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 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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)"

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

"Tell me a story, Pew."

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

"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)"

"He smiled."

"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)"

"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;"

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

"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."

"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."

"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?""

"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"."

"Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people’s lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day."

"Don't you even feel how marvellous it is to have talked to one of the Little People?" I said. "No, not as the main thing," Grundo grunted. "If you think like that, then you're treating him like something in a museum, not as a person."

"What you do is find your centre - can you do that?" "My navel, you mean?" I said. "No, no!" he howled. "You're not a woman! Or are you?"

"Amazing. You're here, but you can't do a simple thing like raising light, or do I mean lazing right? Whichever. You can't. Why not?" "No one ever showed me how," I said. He swayed about, looking solemn. "I quote," he said. "I'm very well read in the literature of several worlds, you know, and I quote. What do they teach them in these schools?"

""Oh, Lord! He's a weeper!" Grandad said disgustedly. "I wish I'd known. I'd have stayed away." "A lot of Merlins have cried when they prophesied," Dad pointed out. "I know. But I don't have to like it, do I?" Grandad retorted."

"I have been with the Court all my life, travelling with the King's Progress. I didn't know how to go on. I sat and stared at this sentence, until Grundo said, "If you can't do it, I will." If you didn't know Grundo, you'd think this was a generous offer, but it was a threat really. Grundo is dyslexic. Unless he thinks hard, he writes inside out and backwards. He was threatening me with half a page of crooked writing with words like "inside" turning up as "sindie" and "story" as "otsyr"."

"I had a mitherable childhood. Nobody loved me. I think I have a right to try again, looking pwettier, don't you?"

"I don't believe this!" Peter said. "Why is it respectable not to know how to do things? Is it respectable to light a fire with a bar of soap?" "That," Charmain said haughtily, "was an accident."

""Oh, what a sweet little doggie!" Mrs Baker cried out. "Is ooh hungwy, then?" She gave Waif the rest of the cake she was eating. Waif took it politely, ate it in one gulp and continued to beg. Mrs Baker gave her a whole cake from the plate. This caused Waif to beg more soulfully than ever. "I'm disgusted," Charmain told Waif."

"So you'll be wanting all these hydrangeas chopped down, then?" "Whatever for?" Charmain said. "I like to chop things down," the kobold explained. "Chief pleasure of gardening."

"Tell me of this Wizard Howl of yours." Sophie's teeth chattered, but she said proudly, "He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly and you can't pin him down to anything." "Indeed?" asked Abdullah. "Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies." "What do you mean — vices?" Sophie asked angrily. "I was just describing Howl."

"I never said my wishes were supposed to do anyone any good," said the genie. "In fact, I swore that they would always do as much harm as possible."

"Maybe," he said, "you should be more careful about whom you let your dog bite." "Not I!" said Jamal. "I am a believer of free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so."

"It is of course a magic carpet." Abdullah had heard that one before. He bowed over his tucked-up hands. "Many and various are the virtues said to reside in carpets," he agreed. "Which one does the poet of the sands claim for this? Does it welcome a man home to his tent? Does it bring peace to the hearth? Or maybe," he said, poking the frayed edge suggestively with one toe, "it is said to never wear out?"

"Please, your story, or I shall offend the dignitaries of my kingdom by yawning at holy things."

"Oh, thank goodness!" he babbled. "I didn't mean it - at least I did, but I don't mean it now, not any more!" He flung one arm around Yam and twisted the other into Mordion's rolled cloak. "They came. They rustled. Don't let them!"

""One person ought to treat another person properly, even if the person's himself." "What a strange idea!" Mordion said."

"It looks as if you need only enter the field for long enough to recognise the bannus and take hold of it. Then you order it to stop." "Fight my way through a mob of dancing girls and snatch the dulcimer off the leading damsel," Reigner Two said morbidly. "I can just see myself. I think the fools who invented this thing might have thought of a simpler way to stop it. What's wrong with a red switch?"

"Ann looked down at him, spread on the bank preparing to go to sleep, and lost her temper. "Then you should go and tell him! You should look after him! He's all alone in this wood, and he's quite small, and he doesn't even know he's not supposed to go out of it. He probably doesn't even know how to work the field to get food. You - you calmly make him up, out of blood and - and nothing, and you expect him to do your dirty work for you, and you don't even tell him the rules! You can't do that to a person!""

""Curse those two time-ghosts!" he almost shrieked. "They made me quite sure you were the Time Lady! But you're not, are you? I could tell you were a real Twenty Century person with every word you said. Mickey Mouse!" he yelled."

"It was very boring. Perhaps it was his job to be boring, Vivian thought, in which case he was very good at his job."

""If you call me V.S. once again," she said, "I shall scream - I warn you!" Sam patted her arm. "You need a butter-pie," he said kindly."

"But she's too big!" the anguished man said, still glaring at Vivian. "This girl is not the right size!" … "She was six when she went away, Father," Jonathan said. He did not seem in the least alarmed. "That was nearly six years ago. Think how much I've changed since then." "So you have," said this alarming man, turning his glare on Jonathan as if he did not think the change was for the better. "I see," he said. "She grew."

""Can I eat these?" he said. "No," said Vivian. "I'm hungry." "I'll give you half," Sam said, plainly thinking he was being generous."

"Vivian stared. Never had she seen a boy with such long hair! In fact, she had a vague notion that boys were born with their hair short back and sides and only girls had hair that grew long."

"To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever or you did not love them that much."

"Happiness isn't a thing. You can't go out and get it like a cup of tea. It's the way you feel about things."

"Dear Polly, Tom wishes you, for some reason I can't understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs - backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair. This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. I hope you know what all this is about, because I don't. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can. Yours ever, Sam."