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54bc618
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All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.
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madness
academia
maud-bailey
scholarship
obsession
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A.S. Byatt |
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4aaf65b
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So--I went on, on my own--deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride--not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearness of--certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them--intermittent diamond--but the depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker ta..
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sense-of-time
sense-of-self
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A.S. Byatt |
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a044329
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What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime's study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeons before our race was formed. But that fragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on. Hoc opus, hic labor est. There is, I am tempted to assert, no easy way, no short cut: we are, in attempting those, like Bunyan..
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A.S. Byatt |
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fdd8e6f
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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.
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A.S. Byatt |
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3601971
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He always told them the same thing, to begin with. 'Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don't invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don't try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.
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A.S. Byatt |
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2122e3a
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She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped.
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A.S. Byatt |
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5a7cf65
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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.
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A.S. Byatt |
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ee328db
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I would not for the whole world diminish you. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest--"I love you for yourself alone"--"I love you essentially"--and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by "you essentially"--lips hands and eyes. But you must know--we do know--that it is not so--dearest, I love your soul and with that your poetry--the grammar and stopping and hurrying syntax of your quick thought--quite as much essentially you as ..
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A.S. Byatt |
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ec007ef
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She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.
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marriage
relationships
love
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a.s. byatt |
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a84567d
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Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
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identity
individual
nation
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A.S. Byatt |
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2a5c865
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Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].
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time
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A.S. Byatt |
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1058d08
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On the other side of attraction, is repulsion.
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A.S. Byatt |
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e62330a
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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.
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A.S. Byatt |
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c4be8d4
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Balzac's cynicism was always nevertheless romantic - such greed, such gusto. 'Le degout, c'est voir juste. Apres la possession, l'amour voit juste chez les hommes.' Why should that be so? Why was disgust any clearer-eyed than desire?
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A.S. Byatt |
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b1df1fb
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But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.
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myth
environmental-catastrophe
norse-mythology
loki
ragnarok
self-destruction
end-of-the-world
gods
mythology
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a.s. byatt |
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8d0d9d6
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But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.
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love
pride
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A.S. Byatt |
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851bd8e
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To a dusty shelf we aspire.
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A.S. Byatt |
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997f52c
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There will always be people who will slash open the other cheek when it is turned to them.
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A.S. Byatt |
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4afa0e3
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The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic.
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A.S. Byatt |
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a2a8588
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She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had thought, when she started thinking, about her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence.But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, sh..
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A.S. Byatt |
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0ccf306
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You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.
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self
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A.S. Byatt |
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7d3fcb3
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No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull.
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A.S. Byatt |
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71cbbc8
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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 that is what they are. And then there's the problem of being different sexes. I think if they are good friends, then whatever else they are - or are not - is better.
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friendships
men-and-women
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A.S. Byatt |
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6bb298a
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Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means -- and with absolute sincerity -- but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems.
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A.S. Byatt |
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0ce3a07
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We rode back from Richmond decorously side by side on the top of a bus. It was as though my left side (her side) burned and was so to speak dissolving into steam, or gases. Other people may often have experienced this secret journeying with the intention of sex at the end, but I was new to it, as I was new to what Fulla had done to my skin and bone-marrow, my fingers and toes, not to mention the most obvious part, or parts of me. I could ha..
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A.S. Byatt |
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7f70335
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Therefore,' said Loki the mockery, to the snake his daughter, 'we need to know everything, or at least as much as we can. The gods have secret runes to help in the hunt, or give victory in battle. They hammer, they slash. They do not study. I study. I know.
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loki
anti-intellectualism
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A.S. Byatt |
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a7e4836
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He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not.
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A.S. Byatt |
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41019e7
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Iron bars make a cage all right, and the more you look at them or reproduce them the more you know it's a real cage.
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A.S. Byatt |
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1351b12
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The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life...
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A.S. Byatt |
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8e9bf8c
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A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference and dislike; also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forebears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else too, a single flame which ..
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A.S. Byatt |
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057437f
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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 work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child's head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.
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norse-mythology
myths
mythology
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A.S. Byatt |
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5add59d
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Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and faked. He was afraid of being isolated and solitary, which he feared was his fate. He was certainly not himself an object of desire to other boys, as far as he knew--and he was knowing.
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A.S. Byatt |
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e2d80d0
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One of you needs food,' said the Old Woman, 'and three of you need healing.' So the Princess sat down to good soup, and fresh bread, and fruit tart with clotted cream and a mug of sharp cider, and the Old Woman put the creatures on the table, and healed them in her way. Her way was to make them tell the story of their hurts, and as they told, she applied ointments and drops with tiny feathery brushes and little bone pins ...
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A.S. Byatt |
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2cbf8a1
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The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.
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A.S. Byatt |
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883738d
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Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn't she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.
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A.S. Byatt |
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3cbd240
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He began to walk into the pottery, which had been the dairy. He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn't give up their wrath, even if they needed to.
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A.S. Byatt |
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218ba9e
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Did we not--did you not flame, and I catch fire?
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A.S. Byatt |
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d7a5063
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You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.
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youth
writing
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A.S. Byatt |
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bfe2682
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There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.
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A.S. Byatt |
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4371128
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Everybody's possibilities solidify round them and become limitations.
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A.S. Byatt |
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1de9c55
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Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them.
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A.S. Byatt |
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f027d20
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I wish," said Dr Perholt to the djinn, "I wish you would love me." "You honor me," said the djinn, "and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do."
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love
life-stories
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A.S. Byatt |
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7555c65
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She tells her love while half asleep, In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As Earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow.
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A.S. Byatt |
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98a98d9
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How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence.
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A.S. Byatt |