Time & Perspective Quote by Jeanette Winterson

Winterson smuggles a radical bit of emotional self-defense into the language of romance. The line rejects the common script where love is a one-way donation, a saintly “giving yourself” that quietly sanctifies imbalance. Instead, she swaps the moral vocabulary: not charity but credit. To “lend” your heart implies terms, duration, and, crucially, ownership that remains intact even while you’re all in. It’s an insistence that intimacy doesn’t have to mean liquidation of the self.

The sly brilliance is in the second sentence, which turns practicality into a philosophical dagger: “how could we take it back without asking?” The question exposes how often people stay trapped in attachments because they’ve made surrender sound noble. If you “gave away” your heart, retrieval becomes theft or humiliation - you’d need permission from the very person who may have benefited from your erasure. By reframing love as a loan, Winterson restores agency: leaving isn’t betrayal, it’s reclaiming what was always yours.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in Winterson’s larger project: dismantling inherited narratives about gender, desire, and devotion, especially the ones that reward self-abandonment. The subtext is not cynicism about love; it’s a demand for love that doesn’t require a hostage situation. The wit lands because it’s coolly legalistic about something we’re trained to treat as mystical, and the contrast exposes the emotional economics underneath.