Quotes from Gut Symmetries
by Jeanette Winterson

"This is the alchemic vessel, resistant to change, constantly being transformed. This is us, vulnerable, insulated, entirely self-contained yet altogether at the mercy of the elements. The Ship of Fools is sailing tonight and all of us are aboard."

"Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?"

"I don't own my own emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt."

"Beauty and pain are not separate."

"My fingers were sticky. Hate. Anger. Pain. The words would not fall. I was bleeding words. I went into the bathroom to try to wash them away but when I drew back my hand from the clear cold water, the words welled up again, red and liquid, danger words, broken words, the cracked vessel of my love for him."

"Blood and tears and crumbled words and words not fit for human use. Without love what does humanness mean?"

"HE: What's the matter with you?
ME: Nothing.
Nothing slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say, surprised, in the way that they are forever surprised, 'But there was nothing the matter with her'
Nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, love to love."

"What kills love? Only this: neglect."

"I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
Past? Present? Future? The language of the dead. Totality of time."

"The dream: to pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it."

"It would have been better if I had been made of nylon; easier then to soak out the miseries that were soaking in."

"'Intensity is the Desire to Receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.'"

"'Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve.'(Max Planck)"

"What is the separateness of things when the current that flows each to each is live? It is the livingness I want. Not mummification. Livingness."

"'The bright boy who loves and hates America. Loves it because it has given him everything. Hates it because it has given him everything. The ambivalence of the immigrant everywhere.'"

"Listen: one plays the lute and another the harp. The strings are vibrating and from the music of the spheres a perfect universe is formed. Lover and beloved pass into one another identified by sound."

"Walk with me. Walk the ancient history of his body, recorded in quasars, erupted in light. Kiss him and I kiss the full of him and the dust of him. Touch him where he is firm and my hand passes through into empty space. Love him and I love this man, this body. Love him and I love star-dust and light."

"The difficulty is that every firm step I win out of chaos is a firm step towards...more chaos. I throw a rope bridge, haul myself across the gap, and huddled on a little outcrop, safe for now, observe the view. What is the view? Another gap, another stretch of water."

"The wind at dusk. We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. It was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it. Lighter than light in the atmosphere of our love."

"And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives."

"The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that returns us without warning to a place we thought we had sailed through long since."

"The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes. We tow it down river, people and things, emotions, time's inhabitants, not left on shore way back, but still swimming close by."

"The unconscious, it seems, will not let go of its hoard. The past comes with us and occasionally kidnaps the present, so taht the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be who we are."

"If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water."

"I had come out dressed to kill and I was the one being murdered."

"My self-esteem is a jigsaw I cannot complete. I get one part of the picture and the rest lies in pieces. I suspect that there is no picture, only fragments. Other people seem to glue it together somehow and not worry that they ahve been using pieces from several different boxes. So what is the answer? Is identity a deceit, a make-shift, and should we hurry to make any pattern we can? Or is there a coherence, perhaps a beauty, if it were possible to find it?"..."The best there is are days when the jigsaw assumes its own meaning and I no longer care what picture is emerging."..."I said I suspect that there is no picture. I should have said that whatever the picture is, it will not be the one on the box."

"The kiss was a smoke bomb to cause confusion and distract attention."

"Walk with me. Walk the broken past, named and not. Walk the splintered plank, chaos on both sides, walk the discovered and what cannot be discovered. Walk the uneasy peace we share.
Walk with me, through the night, the night air, breathing particles of other lives. Breathe in, breathe out, steady now, not too fast on gassed lungs. I did not mean my words to poison you.
Walk with me, walk it off, the excess fat of misery and fear. Too much to carry around the heart. Walk free."

"Desiring her I felt my own desirability. It was an act of power but not power over her. I was my own conquest."

"You see, I could have rested there beside her, perhaps forever, it felt like forever, a mirror confusion of bodies and sighes, undifferentiated, she in me, me in she and no longer exhausted by someone else's shape over mine."

"I want to feel but with feeling comes pain."

"What would happen if I came face to face with what I am? I think it is happening but because I do not recognise myself I say it is somebody else; him, her, them, who are responsible. Responsible for my terror."

"There are children who grow up as I did, with love clamped down in them, who cannot afterwards love at all. There are others who make fools of themselves, loving widely, indiscreetly, forgetting it is themselves they are trying to love back to a better place."

"perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day damned."

"Some people dream in colour, I feel in colour, strong tones taht I hue down for a comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?"

"What would it be to love? Would it be the fields under rain, the vivid green the grass takes? Would it be the air current the bird finds? Would it be the fox and the fox hole? Would it be natural at all? Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure or sleight of hand? would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or a song I sing?
If I am a wound would love be my salve?
If I am speechless would love be a mouth?"

"I do not want to declare love on you as of midnight yesterday. I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun at your head. I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a volunteer member of the FBI. Where did you go, who did you see, what did you do today dear? I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own leve. Or I would not love you at all."

"Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar."

"The geneticists will scoff and since I cannot prove them wrong any more than they can prove themselves right, I shall only mention that scoffing is not a very scientific approach."

"If the horror is inside you how do you get it out?"

"Getting old was not something hehad expected. He wanted to say, 'Why am I old?' and although he knew that question had no meaning, it had meaning to him. His body and his mind, allies for so long, had begun to quarrel. And his spirit? Where was his spirit in this new parting of the ways? He didn't believe in God but occasionally, uncomfortably, he had a sense that God believed in him."

"'People are not recyclable,' he thought. 'I should enjoy being melted down into something new.'"

"Do I want to look at you, afraid of what I might see? I prefer to look through you, round you, with you, anything to avoid the intensity of one single face. And will you look at me, hood thrown back, vulnerable?"

"And if our lives here are not the total our death here will not be final."

"My grandmother's old-fashioned religious comfort of an afterlife may not be as soft-headed as some believe. As an armchair atheist I stumble into God as soon as I get up and walk. I do not know what God is, but I use it as a notation of value."

"What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millennia, the expanding universe opening in your gut. No longer confined by volume, my father is free to choose the extent of himself. Is that him, among the stars and starfish of different skies?"

"To each his own epidural. It does ease the pain but the pain persists, the dull ache, low down as though my back had been broken andnot properly healed. Perhaps it would be better to lie on his grave like a dog. To howl out hte plain fact that there is no comfort, no relief, that grief must be endured until it has exhausted itself on me. My mind repeats its exercises like a lessonbook.Over and over the same ground, memories, happiness, the said and unsaid, the lst hours, helplessness of the living, autonomy of the dead."

"What words? What words can I trust to convey this fragile heart?"

"The much of you was more than I dared hope for. Treasure is the stuff of legends. Gold in the mine of you. Mine own gold. I thought you were a jewelled bird of the kind Byzantine emperors kept. Rare, fabulous, told of but unseen."

"We did escape gravity. If I flew too close to the sun, forgive me."

"The human condition seems tobe one of waiting to be rescued. Will it be you? Will it be today? Will the world open in splendent colour, spirit-blue, that aniline blue, ripe indigo or the tone of an unclouded sky? Say it will. Each other's greatest fear. Each other's only hope."

"I disguise myself as your rescuer so that you will be mine."

"I lose my balance easily and I hear voices. He is afraid that I am mad but I am not mad. I have been hurt and he is the hurter. I have been damaged and he has damaged me. It is easier for him to worry that I am mad."

"HE: Why do you continually confuse love and sex?
ME: Why do you continually separate them?"

"I touched her face, her eyelids fluttering, tears under them, where the pain was. No more crying. No more pain. I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine. The world is real and it has hurt us. Signs, shadows, wonders, do you still believe that, now that your multiple world has hardened into this brick wall?"

"I separated myself from too much hurt. Even now, there is a close association in my gut between feeling and pain. Logically I recognise that feeling is, often is, pleasure and delight. Nevertheless, at an instinctual level, at a level outside of logic, feeling is pain."

"I love badly. That is, too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out of the window."

"I want to love well. To see you as you are, not as a character in my film noir. I want the unknowableness and intimacy of another human being."

"If this is going to succeed it will take years. I will have to find the years because I want to stand before you naked. I want to love you well."

"I touch you and you disappear. Always you escape me. The nearer I come to you the further off you seem. The more I know of you the more enigmatical you are."

"The air is thick with bodies. Breathe in, breathe out the daily crematorium. Lung up on the dead. The bellows in your rib cage are home to millions, tall like you, uncertain like you, mother, father, sister, friend, tenemented into spinning lots, decayed from mastery into breath."

"Call yourself a lady, taking fingers and toes like snuff? The circuits of your air are a nightmare out of Bosch."

"The dead live again. The destroyed are rebuilt. There is music, dancing, food unfound in recipe books. Your body refleshes the air. You are still the perfect clay, amiable, vital, capable of being breathed upon and accepting that breath as your own."

"Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?"

"The Jews believe that the soul comes to inhabit the body at the moment of birth. Until then, until the image of itself becomes flesh, it pursues its crystal pattern, untied. Wave function of life scattered down to one dear face. How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much."

"Perhaps some things take more than a single lifetime to complete. Perhaps I too have begun to imagine more than can be seen with the instruments we as yet posess."

"The difficulty. The dream. To pan the living river that you are and find gold in it. But the river moves on, never step in the same river twice, time surging forward and sometimes leaving a caracol, its half-turned backwards that mocks the clock."

"If the universe is movement it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time."

"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."