“And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman's fortune or one man's loss. And we can't know the lives of others. And we can't know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside the clocks. It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“She looked at me.
There was a second
the kind that holds the whole world ...”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“You were loved then and you are loved now. Isn’t that enough?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold

“I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What’s the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”’ That’s from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold

“The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“I guess I'm afraid of not being like other people. No, that's not true. I'm not afraid of not being like other people. I'm afraid I won't find anybody who doesn't mind me not being like other people. I'm not ambitious for money or power. I want to find some real way to live.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold

“I walked round the block thinking I’d think about it, but my legs were heading home, and sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold

“Getting older happens suddenly. It's like swimming out to sea and realising that the shore you're making for isn't the shore where you started out.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“She had been a career woman all her life. She noted there was no such thing as a career man. She had made her choices. No regrets. But there were losses. There always were.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“I've thought of killing myself many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“He doesn't take a photo or a video because he wants to remember — by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can't capture.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Maybe then I will remember that, although history repeats itself and we always fall, and I am a carrier of history whose brief excursion into time leaves no mark, I have known something worth knowing, wild and unlikely and against every rote.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman!s fortune or one man!s loss. And we can!t know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present, but the past is right behind you like a shadow.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Neither parent spoke. Milo stood between them like a lighthouse between the rocks and the shipwreck.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“He loves books,’ said Perdita. ‘Yeah. He does. When you’ve finished a book you can put it away and it doesn’t ask to see you again.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold

“Our habits and our fears make our choices. We are an algorithm of ourselves--if you liked that you may also like this.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold

“Xeno couldn't manage too much nearness. He was solitary and introverted, with an enthusiasm that people mistook for sociability. He was interested in everything, attentive to people, genuinely kind, and entirely present when he was present. But he was never sorry to close the door at night or to be alone.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“En de tijd die zo gestaag en zo zeker voorbijgaat slaat voorbij de klokken op hol. Het kost zo weinig tijd om een leven te veranderen en het kost een heel leven om die verandering te begrijpen.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“And you and me in the car where we've always been, where we'll always be, this night, this road, even when we're gone and the road is gone and the city is gone but we'll be here because everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“She wanted to kiss the hesitation of his throat.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time