Jeanette Winterson Children Quotations

Tell me the story, Pew. . . . It was a woman. You always say that. There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good. Is that the complete list? Then there is the woman you love. Who's she? That's another story.

What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.

I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

Even death after a long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. ... Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today?

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.

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

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.

Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love. But they might not be telling the truth. Never mind that. You tell them the truth. What do you mean? You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own. So what should I say? When? When I love someone? You should say it.