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37f715e
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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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A.S. Byatt |
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a454b8c
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I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the ..
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A.S. Byatt |
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c4a6a1e
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It's exhausting. When everything's a deliberate political stance. Even if it's interesting.
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A.S. Byatt |
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39cd680
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Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and s..
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literature
poetry
writing
craft
skill
self-confidence
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A.S. Byatt |
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32c8f39
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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prose
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A.S. Byatt |
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8e4d9ef
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They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously?' he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, 'That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.
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A.S. Byatt |
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826098d
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Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare's rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet.
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A.S. Byatt |
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405672e
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Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle. "I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-" "Beautiful." "Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening" "It needn't." "Even you - drew back - when we met. I expect that now. I use it." "Yes. But yo..
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A.S. Byatt |
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8aeecdf
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He had said she was provocative; so she was, she needed to prove she was there to be seen; but the proof always, contradictorily, drove her to further uncertain agony of guilt and self-distaste.
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A.S. Byatt |
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60175c3
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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A.S. Byatt |
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54a0e10
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There are readings--of the same text--that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are--believe it--impersonal readings--where the mind's..
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reading
readings
subjective-readings
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A.S. Byatt |
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a8044a0
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Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott . . . who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web - to ply an industrious shuttle - to make - something - to close the Shutters and the Peephole too -
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A.S. Byatt |
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7e0ac1d
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Randolph Henry Ash: "What is it? My dear?" Christabel LaMotte: "Ah, how can we bear it?" Randolph Henry Ash: "Bear what?" Christabel LaMotte: "This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?" Randolph Henry Ash: "We can be quiet together, and pretend - since it is only the beginning - that we have all the time in the world." Christabel LaMotte: "And every day we shall have less. And then none." Randolph Henry Ash: "Would you rat..
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togetherness
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A.S. Byatt |
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6de026a
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You are a born storyteller," said the old lady. "You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one." --
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A.S. Byatt |
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f6cd137
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A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender it - this was the wise saying of Sir Thomas Browne.
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truth
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A.S. Byatt |
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28b897e
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There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy skull on skull, through soft skin and softer flesh. He thought: skulls separate people. In this one sense, I could say, they would say, I lose myself in her. But in that bone box, she thinks and thinks, as I think in mine, things the other won't hear, can't hear, though we go on like this for sixty years. What does she think I am? He had no i..
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A.S. Byatt |
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9f396c7
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Maud considered. She said, 'In every age, there must be truths people can't fight - whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose - to imagine - he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely - but not in the large plan -
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A.S. Byatt |
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c89a0cf
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All old stories, my cousin, will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which be there - in this case the angry Ocean, the terrible leap of the horse, the fall of Dahud from the crupper, the engulfment etc etc. And yet to add something of yours, of the writer, which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated fo..
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A.S. Byatt |
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502f958
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Loki] was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons...He was amused and dangerous, neither good nor evil. Thor was the classroom bully raised to the scal..
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A.S. Byatt |
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10ff149
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Good writing is always new.
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A.S. Byatt |
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f3f8b3c
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Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.
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A.S. Byatt |
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e030bc1
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He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself. He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not.
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A.S. Byatt |
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e12e17d
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It was hard for a man and a woman to be fiends with no under thought or glimpsed prospect of sex. They wanted to be friends. It was almost a matter of principle. She was as intelligent as any Fellow of King's - though he thought she did not know it - he was in love with her mind as it followed clues through labyrinths. Love is, among many other things, a response to energy, and Griselda's mind was precise and energetic. He wanted to make lo..
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A.S. Byatt |
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f19f345
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She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.
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A.S. Byatt |
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e05986f
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All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable.
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A.S. Byatt |
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ed9a413
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You do not seem aware, for all of your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen--let alone as in our case, the *hypothetick* productions--are greeted with. The best we may hope is--oh, it is excellently done--*for a woman.* And then there are Subjects we may not treat--things we may not know...We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts--mere chalices of Purity--we ..
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A.S. Byatt |
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4a64f4d
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We are a Faustian generation, my dear--we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.
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A.S. Byatt |
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76b1656
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Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion.
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A.S. Byatt |
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3171024
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Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone's primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place.
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A.S. Byatt |
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8e83002
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She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.
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imagery
hair
description
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A.S. Byatt |
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0b0379b
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You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of ;unsatisfied love; - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to ;being i..
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women
inspiration
love
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A.S. Byatt |
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45a93f8
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She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds.
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nature
english-garden
flowers
description
england
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A.S. Byatt |
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2b0dd42
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There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value..
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A.S. Byatt |
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6b0d643
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Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settled at a different distance, an object of interest, not of choking confinement. He reread his letters. The world opened. [...] How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence. Nothing in what he had written ..
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A.S. Byatt |
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9f524dc
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A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
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A.S. Byatt |
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444ca89
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She leads you on and baffles you," said Beatrice. "She wants you to know and not to know. She took care to write down that the box was there. And she buried it."
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A.S. Byatt |
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1d9c608
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But poets don't want homes -- do they? -- they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds.
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A.S. Byatt |
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63e2c59
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
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A.S. Byatt |
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e846496
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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 preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
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religion
god
punishment
logic
sin
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A.S. Byatt |
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65ba5d8
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She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because she couldn't decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband.
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A.S. Byatt |
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16e08d7
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Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.
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possession
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A.S. Byatt |
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53c333d
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The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. ...The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless.
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old-age
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A.S. Byatt |
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37ebfdb
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He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women.
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character-development
characteristics
prose
description
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A.S. Byatt |
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5ed981c
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Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.
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A.S. Byatt |