Wit & Attitude Quote by Jeanette Winterson

To call the irrational “foolish” to ignore is a neat Winterson pivot: she flatters reason while quietly staging its limits. The line doesn’t romanticize chaos; it warns that pretending we’re purely rational is its own kind of fantasy. Winterson’s fiction has always treated desire, memory, myth, and faith not as decorative flourishes but as operating systems. You can sneer at them, but they still run the machine.

The intent is pragmatic, almost unsentimental. “Take…seriously” isn’t “believe blindly.” It’s closer to: account for it, study it, admit its power. The subtext is that politics, love, art, and identity are driven less by clean arguments than by story-shaped cravings: shame, longing, fear, obsession. When we refuse to engage those forces, we don’t become more enlightened; we become more manipulable. The irrational doesn’t disappear under scrutiny, it just migrates into conspiracy, consumerism, or the private theater of the self.

Contextually, Winterson writes in the wake of postmodern suspicion about grand narratives, but she isn’t content with cool irony. Her work keeps returning to the ancient tools - fable, symbolism, erotic intensity - to show how humans actually make meaning. The quote doubles as a defense of literature itself: novels are laboratories for the irrational, places where emotion and contradiction can be examined without being reduced to a diagnosis or a slogan.

It “works” because it flips a common hierarchy. Reason isn’t dethroned; it’s asked to grow up and stop pretending it governs alone.