## Metadata - Author: [[Jeanette Winterson]] - Full Title: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Category: #books ## Highlights - what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society? ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=255)) - Babies are frightening – raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. ([Location 297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=297)) - When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=352)) - Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear . . . Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world. ([Location 451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=451)) - The fairy tales warn us that there is no such thing as standard size – that is an illusion of industrial life – an illusion farmers still struggle with when trying to supply uniform vegetables to supermarkets . . . no, size is both particular and subject to change. The stories of the gods appearing in human form – scaled-down power deities – are also stories against judging by appearances – things are not what they seem. It seems to me that being the right size for your world – and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions – is a valuable clue to learning how to live. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=462)) - I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance. ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=500)) - I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels. I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place. ([Location 518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=518)) - Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. ([Location 550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=550)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - the two parts of home that mattered to me in Accrington are the parts I could least do without now. They are the threshold and the hearth. ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=759)) - I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care. Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love. ([Location 960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=960)) - Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open – the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants. ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=1441)) - The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own. ([Location 1543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=1543)) - ‘Whenever I am troubled,’ said the librarian, ‘I think about the Dewey decimal system.’ ‘Then what happens?’ asked the junior, rather overawed. ‘Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course – as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.’ ([Location 1548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=1548)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture – exploit the new thing then move on. There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations. Reading is where the wild things are. ([Location 1735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=1735)) - Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time. ([Location 1837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=1837)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Until the 1950s half the suicides in England were gassings. Household gas came from coal gas in those days and coal gas is high in carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless and the enemy of oxygen-dependent creatures. It causes hallucinations and depression. It can make you see apparitions – indeed, there is an argument that the haunted house is the house whose vapours are not spectral but chemical. This may well be true. The nineteenth century was the century of frightful spectres and shadowy visitations. It was the century of the supernatural in fiction and in the popular imagination. Dracula, The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the visions of M. R. James and Edgar Allan Poe. The rise of the weekly seance. The century of gas lamps and ghosts. They may have been the same thing. The classic image of a man or woman sitting up late by gaslight and seeing a ghost could have been a case of mild delirium caused by carbon-monoxide poisoning. When natural gas was introduced in the 1960s, the British suicide rate fell by one-third – so perhaps that’s why there have been fewer ghosts for us to see, or perhaps we are not hallucinating at home any more. ([Location 1990](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=1990)) - Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life – to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life. And extremes – whether of dullness or fury – successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies – unconscious strategies – to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too – sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life. It takes courage to feel the feeling – and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable? ([Location 2026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=2026)) - I often hear voices. I realise that drops me in the crazy category but I don’t much care. If you believe, as I do, that the mind wants to heal itself, and that the psyche seeks coherence not disintegration, then it isn’t hard to conclude that the mind will manifest whatever is necessary to work on the job. ([Location 2034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=2034)) - Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it. Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time. ([Location 2042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=2042)) - There was a person in me – a piece of me – however you want to describe it – so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace. That part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage a raid on the rest of the territory. ([Location 2043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=2043)) - Remember the princess who kisses the frog – and yippee, there’s a prince? Well, it is necessary to embrace the slimy loathsome thing usually found in the well or in the pond, eating slugs. But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us. This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That’s the problem – the awful thing is you. It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. Mess this up, and you will go down with the creature. ([Location 2056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=2056)) - Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall. Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love. We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities. In my work I found a way to talk about love – and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing. ([Location 2220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007D6EW8U&location=2220))