"I'm telling you stories. Trust me."

There's no pawnshop for the heart. You can't take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times.

You can't make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive. And if you refuse?

There's no one distinct narrative in The Passion. The speaker is neither male nor female, or rather, one who doesn't identify oneself. The points of view also shift, which seems disorienting but in fact, is nary an issue because the book doesn't think love is any different for anyone different.

The Passion is strongly reminiscent of Wilde's maxim-spouting methods which a colleague recently described as "trying to say simple things in a deep way", which I think Wilde himself would quite fancy the notion of - simply because 'Art for art's sake!' It probably is subjective then, because I think these simple truths have never been so clearly elicited out, that it seems like puffed up poetic bollocks, but in retrospect, is truth as what it is.

Sometimes love - the love we think we know - just isn't enough.

As Winterson herself admits, all her books are about the same things: desires and boundaries.

And this continual back-and-forthing does nobody any good in the end. It will give us bestselling classics and intimate sessions with pen and ink, it gives us bloody material and the finest inspiration but our souls? The reason why she writes, he writes, they write, we write is simple but deeply unnerving: We cannot give ourselves up.