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1ed795c
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I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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A.S. Byatt |
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5309938
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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A.S. Byatt |
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39f6cdb
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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.
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A.S. Byatt |
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bdb1023
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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 away--but oh how I sing in my gold cage.
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solitude
peace
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A.S. Byatt |
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e4534bc
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What is it my dear?" Ah, how can we bear it?" Bear what?" This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?" We can be quiet together, and pretend - since it is only the beginning - that we have all the time in the world." And every day we shall have less. And then none." Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?" No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this wi..
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A.S. Byatt |
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e8efcb4
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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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words
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A.S. Byatt |
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ce9fd16
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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A.S. Byatt |
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809ec97
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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
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A.S. Byatt |
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c90c49b
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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
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ice
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A.S. Byatt |
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04391b2
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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reading
writing
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A.S. Byatt |
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519a9a5
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An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream."
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A.S. Byatt |
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9792ccf
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He her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings.
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A.S. Byatt |
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d19537d
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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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1990
sabine-de-kercoz
murphy-s-law
bitterness
human-nature
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A.S. Byatt |
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79a4dc3
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She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.
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A.S. Byatt |
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ba8f8e3
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Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark--readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has ap..
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words
literature
reading
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A.S. Byatt |
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42205a3
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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." --
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A.S. Byatt |
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c51c683
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I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things - once commenced - only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending - sweet or sour - and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
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A.S. Byatt |
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8656dbe
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The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
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wisdom
knowledge
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A.S. Byatt |
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f3ef89d
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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"."
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thoughts
truth
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A.S. Byatt |
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06744c0
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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A.S. Byatt |
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0ac5b48
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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.
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A.S. Byatt |
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d2e31e0
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How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.
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A.S. Byatt |
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ea8e27f
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Lists are a form of power.
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A.S. Byatt |
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7f812d5
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Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
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A.S. Byatt |
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2dbec13
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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-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.
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love
here-and-now
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A.S. Byatt |
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409cec0
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Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance , and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, ..
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A.S. Byatt |
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b9d1978
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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.
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opposite
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A.S. Byatt |
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662fbc4
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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."
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A.S. Byatt |
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d9ca733
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Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits an..
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fairy-tales-for-adults
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A.S. Byatt |
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84ef3eb
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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....
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A.S. Byatt |
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d86fb30
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All these are true and none. The place is there Is what we name it, and is not. It .
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A.S. Byatt |
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55abd47
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Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a fi..
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romance
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A.S. Byatt |
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79a81bb
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She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower.
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A.S. Byatt |
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f228a55
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You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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A.S. Byatt |
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709c7e1
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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.
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A.S. Byatt |
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6a948ad
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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 artist had intended.
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norse
intellectual
mythology
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A.S. Byatt |
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860c956
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He hesitated. "They were what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else." Maud smiled then. "Exactly. That's it. What could survive our education."
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A.S. Byatt |
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d6a57ed
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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 howling dark.
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A.S. Byatt |
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aa568a6
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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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A.S. Byatt |
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2fa056c
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failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements... Any one of the old four - earth, air, fire, water - can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter - months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln.
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pottery
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A.S. Byatt |
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0aafb47
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It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette , melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally..
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reading
pleasures
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A.S. Byatt |
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f6d740d
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But now, my dear, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.
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A.S. Byatt |
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cf23e1b
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There were times when [he] allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say, his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man's thoughts, all his work another man's work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly... It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate.
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A.S. Byatt |
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7cc4559
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The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time,..
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A.S. Byatt |