Lighthousekeeping
Metadata
- Author: Jeanette Winterson
Highlights
Others joined in, and it was soon discovered that every light had a story – no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.’ — location: 336
‘For you, child, all around, like the sea. For me, the sea is never still, she’s always changing. I’ve never lived on land and I can’t say what’s this or that. I can only say what’s ebbing and what’s becoming.’ — location: 387
He thought of the poor male seahorse carrying his babies in his pouch before the rising water had fastened him to the rock forever. — location: 845
The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language. — location: 906
In nature, he found not past, present and future as we recognise them, but an evolutionary process of change – energy never trapped for too long – life always becoming. — location: 1025
I thought of Pew tearing stories out of light. — location: 1082
Tristan, weak and wounded, should have died. Love healed him. Love is not part of natural selection. — location: 1130
And yet, the human body is still the measure of all things. This is the scale we know best. This ridiculous six feet belts the globe and everything in it. We talk about feet, hands, spans, because that is what we know. We know the world by and through our bodies. This is our lab; we can’t experiment without it. — location: 1140
Broken limbs, drilled skulls, but no sign of the heart. Dig deeper, and there’ll be a story, layered by time, but true as now. — location: 1145
The simple image is complex. My heart is a muscle with four valves. It beats 101,000 times a day, it pumps eight pints of blood around my body. Science can bypass it, but I can’t. I say I give it to you, but I never do. Don’t I? In the fossil record of my past, there is evidence that the heart has been removed more than once. The patient survived. Broken limbs, drilled skulls, but no sign of the heart. Dig deeper, and there’ll be a story, layered by time, but true as now. — location: 1143
‘What if I was Tristan?’ I asked you one day, and I watched you grow pale, and take a dagger. You had every right to kill me. I turned my throat to you, Adam’s apple twitching slightly, but before I closed my eyes, I smiled. — location: 1157
I turned to death full face, as I had turned to love with my whole body. I would let death enter me as you had entered me. You had crept along my blood vessels through the wound, and the blood that circulates returns to the heart. You circulated me, you made me blush like a girl in the hoop of your hands. You were in my arteries and my lymph, you were the colour just under my skin, and if I cut myself, it was you I bled. Red Isolde, alive on my fingers, and always the force of blood pushing you back to my heart. — location: 1177
Jekyll — location: 1209
He took the seahorse out of his pocket – his emblem of lost time. — location: 1230
We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out. — location: 1292
happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature – as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies. — location: 1311
I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature – as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies. — location: 1310
But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love – all love – love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe. — location: 1314
‘Art is one way of discovering a genuine and unforced pattern in our lives and in the world around us and that’s why writing can never be formulaic.’ — location: 1544
Storytelling teaches us to be unafraid of our imaginative power and I think it teaches us to be unafraid of the exuberance and the unruly, untamed nature of life, of our lives. So in a world which is obsessed with taming, obsessed with making sense of things – which often means reducing those things – stories are a way of making sense differently, of enlarging upon what we are and not being afraid of the unruly elements within it. — location: 1552
Facts are partial. Fiction is a more complete truth. If we read ourselves as narrative, we can change the story that we are. If we read ourselves as literal and fixed, we find we can change nothing. Someone will always tell the story of our lives – it had better be ourselves. — location: 1734
I hoped that the narrative naturalism of film, and television in particular, would free up the novel from its dreary burden of ‘life as it is lived’, and allow it the talismanic and imaginative possibilities of poetry, where language, and ambition for the form itself, would be more important, more interesting, than everyday narrative. — location: 1742