You now need to be building up your own bank of quotations from your wider reading which you can pull out at the drop of a hat. At the English Literature conference today, Jeanette Winterson, author of 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit' (which she wrote when she was 24 and published in .....), 'The Passion' set in 18th Century Venice, 'Sexing the Cherry', 'Written On the Body' and, since opening her own vegetable shop and tiring of fruity titles, most recently, 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?', made lots of statements you could quote in your essays, both for your exam and for coursework. Here are a few:
"All of life is about relationships .. and the heart of relationships is love."
"The love you experience early on in life becomes a template for what love is to you."
"You are the upgrade generation. Why stay with one partner when you can upgrade them like a phone?"
"Reading gives you language - we can't reduce the world to karate-chop syntax - we live in a complex world and it needs the capacity for complex thought ... and to be articulate."
"Art encourages you to think wider, to put yourself in someone else's situation."
With 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit', I wanted to write my own Bible; if God can write the Bible, why can't I?"
For me, life is rich, and it's always opening up into a metaphor of some kind."
And perhaps not for your essays, but great thoughts, anyway:
On life in general:
"Life is propositional: nothing 'has' to be."
"How are we going to reorganise a global society... in a mixed world that has changed and will go on changing?"
"Economics is not a force of nature - people just make it up as they go along."
"Facts are misleading things; even more statistics."
"Everything that is outside of you can be taken away at any moment. Then ask yourself what would be left inside?"
On education:
"If you educated everybody, governments would be terrified."
