A. S. Byatt - Possession (1990)

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

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

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

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 human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

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

A. S. Byatt
An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

A. S. Byatt
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

A. S. Byatt
Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.

A. S. Byatt
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

A. S. Byatt
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...

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
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

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

A. S. Byatt