Just a few lines from Jeanette Winterson's masterpiece
Written on the Body
"Written on the body is a secret code only visiblew in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places, the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book..."
"You said 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when i say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them..."
"In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold onto this pulse against all other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but her is her hand with my future in its palm..."
"'Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and cannot find my way out. Sometimes I think I am free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how i know you. You are what I know..."
"Louse, your nakedness was too much for me, who had not learned the extent of your fingers. How could I cover this land? Did Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas? I had no dreams to possess you but I wanted you to possess me..."
