'Winterson's great gift is capturing the emotional heft of her stories with sentences that hum along, ... tmi.me/1fblJ9

'But Winterson's gift for capturing unspoken emotion with powerful but never overwritten lyricism...' (Dean Bakopoulos, NYT)

The pain would come back again and again if I didn't live in the grief. And the thought of it coming back was awful, unbearable.

(...) and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.

I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start ... tmi.me/1f6ygk

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative.

They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives.

I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives.

But whatever extends the day loses us the dark.

It's fashionable now to say that any mistake is made by both of you. That's not always true. One person can easily kill another.

We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell.

When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies?

I interpret the world by confusing other people’s psychology with my own. I say I am open-minded but what I think is.

What I call light is my own blend of darkness.

hearth from the quest.

Our story is the old clash between history and home. Or to put it another way, the immeasurable impossible space that seems to divide the