Book Notes, Fiction # Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit  by Jeanette Winterson, 1985 ★☆☆☆☆ It was witty at times, there were a few nice sentences, but nothing of substance, and I already forgot the ending. This story reminded me of another one I read a while back where the protagonist was also a kid growing up with a religious fanatic parent (Kambili in [[Purple Hibiscus]]). I appreciated here the same candor in the description of how the kid is modeling their world to fit the reality of their parent, the only one they know. Some bits of the writing were funny but overall it was hard for me to follow the story and unimpressive to read. --- **Female lead character**: Jeanette. Jeanette was adopted by a devout religious single mum to be raised as a missionary but is forced to leave her community at about 19 after several exorcism attempts to cure her lesbianism fail. --- ## Quotes I liked "An old woman had made it for me, and made the neck hole the same size as the arm holes, so I always had sore ears. Once I went deaf for three months with my adenoids: no one noticed that either. I was lying in bed one night, thinking about the glory of the Lord, when it struck me that life had gone very quiet. I had been to church as usual, sung as loudly as ever, but it had seemed for some time that I was the only one making a noise. I had assumed myself to be in a state of rapture, not uncommon in our church, and later I discovered my mother had assumed the same. When May had asked why I wasn’t answering anybody, my mother had said, ‘It’s the Lord.’ ‘What’s the Lord?’ May was confused. ‘Working in mysterious ways,’ declared my mother, and walked ahead." ** ‘All things fall and are built again. And those that build them again are gay.’ ** "What could I do? My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; ==if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she’d either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.== But most likely, she’d do what most people do when confronted with something they don’t understand: Panic. ==What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).== I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris’s front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs Virtue’s sewing class." ** "Over the years I did my best to win a prize; some wish to better the world and still scorn it. But I never succeeded; there’s a formula, a secret, I don’t know what, that people who have been to public school or Brownies seem to understand. It runs right the way through life, though it starts with hyacinth growing, passes through milk monitor, and finishes somewhere at half-blue." ** "The next day I took it to school and placed it beside the others; there was no comparison. Imagine my horror when it didn’t win. I was not a selfish child and, understanding the nature of genius, ==I would have happily bowed to another’s talent, but not to three eggs covered in cotton wool, entitled ‘Easter Bunnies’.== ‘It’s not fair,’ I told Elsie, later that same evening at the Sisterhood meeting. ==‘You’ll get used to it.’==" ** "They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished. Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that ==no emotion is the final one.==" ** "They exchanged addresses, and began to court one another. It was then that my mother experienced a feeling she had never known before: a fizzing and a buzzing and a certain giddiness. Not only with Pierre, but anywhere, at any time. 'Well, I thought it must be love.’" ** "==Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.== There was a time in England when everyone was much concerned with building wooden boats and sailing off against the Turk. When that stopped being interesting, what peasants there were left limped back to the land, and what nobles there were left plotted against each other. ** "Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently."  ** "Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. ==The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like a string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end.== The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play." ** Katy sat in a deckchair and Katy looked at the sun. Katy ate an ice-cream and Katy looked like fun. ** "==Time is a great deadener; people forget, get bored, grow old, go away.== She said that not much had happened." ** One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s. ** "==It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.==" ** "==It’s a visitor’s privilege to be foolish.==" --- `Just carbon and water. Just atoms and the void.` ---