A.S. Byatt

Quotes

• “The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths ...”
• “He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He...”
• “In the end it wins a king's daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself...”
• “Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midw...”
• “It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to...”
• “She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they p...”
• “She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, acro...”
• “I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn't easy for them being as no one else will suppose that t...”
• “This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-poin...”
• “They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously," he said, pushing...”
• “it [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, ...”
• “[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincin...”
• “As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving ...”
• “Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language ...”
• “You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, bu...”
• “For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and whe...”
• “My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop ...”
• “But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with ...”
• “The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the ar...”
• “It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the ...”
• “That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.”
• “A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.”
• “Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”
• “Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].”
• “She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.”
• “You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”
• “Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.”
• “You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.”
• “Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.”
• “History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...”
• “All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.”
• “You will not be here--I shall not be here--much lo”
• “Outside our small safe place flies mystery.”
• “Good writing is always new.”