A. S. Byatt Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

And where may hide what came and loved our clay? as the Poet asked finely.

A. S. Byatt
It is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

A. S. Byatt
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

A. S. Byatt
There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though it would be wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

A. S. Byatt
Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.

A. S. Byatt
Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss

A. S. Byatt
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".

A. S. Byatt
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

A. S. Byatt
Didactic rushes of information were a great shortcoming in returning travellers.

A. S. Byatt
…words have been all my life, all my life—this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out—the silk is her life, her home, her safety—her food and drink too—and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

A. S. Byatt
That is the main thing, to be alive. As long as you are alive, everything is surprising, rightly seen.

A. S. Byatt
Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

A. S. Byatt
Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

A. S. Byatt
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

A. S. Byatt
The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green.

A. S. Byatt
Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

A. S. Byatt
Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

A. S. Byatt
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

A. S. Byatt
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

A. S. Byatt
Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

A. S. Byatt
Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.

A. S. Byatt
The names of colors are at the edge between where language fails and where it's most powerful.

A. S. Byatt
We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech—but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun....

A. S. Byatt
I shall from time to time write a small Clue — so that you may be the more thoroughly confounded.

A. S. Byatt
Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous.

A. S. Byatt
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

A. S. Byatt
Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

A. S. Byatt
A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

A. S. Byatt
You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

A. S. Byatt
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

A. S. Byatt