Jeanette Winterson

Boating for Beginners

avarni

"Both of them told me to look at the stars, and one also told me that the secret lay in myself. But I am travelling the world because the secret lies outside myself. I follow it and it gets further away."

"The secret of the world is this: the world is entirely circular and you will go round and round endlessly, never finding what you want, unless you have found what you really want inside yourself. When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. It's a reference point, not an end in itself, even though you seem to be following it. So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself. The end of all your exploring will be to cease from exploration and know the place for the first time."

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was. They set it out in order to create a certain effect, and did it so well that we're still arguing about it. Every believer is an anarchist at heart.

True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith. For them, all things are possible. They are poets, insomuch as poetry expands, whereas prose defines. Believers are dangerous and mad and may even destroy the world in a different deluge if they deem it necessary to keep the faith. They are fanatics, and reasonable people will never deal with their excesses until reasonable people find a counter-myth in themselves and learn to fight fire with fire.

It's very potent, that Punch and Judy show book. The Romantics didn't need it because they found their own fire; but almost every other quasi-revolt has gone back to it, because when the heart revolts it wants outrageous things that cannot possibly be factual. Robes and incense and larger-than-life and miracles and heroes. It's all there, it's heart-food, and the more we deprive ourselves of colours and folly, the more attractive that now legitimate folly will become. But read it; read it for its arrogance, its sleight of hand. It's very beautiful, and it's a pointer for living. The mistake is to use it as a handbook. That way madness lies.

She didn't know that on the wild nights no one can call you home except the one who knows your name.

"Now you're being difficult," sighed Gloria. "Why don't we play Hang the Man or I Spy?"

"No, I'd rather play Battleships but we havent any graph paper, have we?" 

They hadn't, and so they were forced to talk about the Space-Time Continuum, and whether or not you should write books which clearly fixed themselves into time or books which flouted the usual notion of time in an effort to clear the mind of arbitrary divisions.

it seems to me that to restrict your fantasy life is the most oppressive form of masochism. And fiction both belongs to and creates fantasy, so why should it not be as wild as your wildest dreams?

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