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84abd38
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Val was eating cornflakes. She ate very little else, at home. They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool.
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cornflakes
repetition
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A.S. Byatt |
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7732181
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She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature--at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out on that night Weep, Weep, the great god Pan is dead.
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A.S. Byatt |
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89b1c05
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in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.
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promise
stories
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A.S. Byatt |
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63b2899
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It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon.
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reality
pleasures
lives
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A.S. Byatt |
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a5e00cf
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The practitioners of 'dry' art admire myth and symbol, precision and coherence; they would, theoretically, be more excited by an interpretation of one of Shakespeare's plays which offered them a beautifully plotted, 'containing' framework of themes and recurrent symbols, than by one which placed its main emphasis on Shakespeare's skill in reproducing the accidental, the idiosyncratic happenings of life, or his power to arouse in the audienc..
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A.S. Byatt |
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31baf6a
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He made the analogy, sometimes, almost bitterly, between Harald's collection of wing-cases and empty ribcages, elephant's feet and Paradise plumes, and Harald's interminably circular book on Design, which rambled on from difficulty to difficulty, from momentarily illuminated clearing to prickling thicket of honest doubt.
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A.S. Byatt |
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9ce2300
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The aspect of this transcendent reality upon which, both in terms of liberal morals, and of the art of the novel, Miss Murdoch lays most emphasis, is what she calls the 'opacity of persons'.
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A.S. Byatt |
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8cb19aa
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And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn't even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams - that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with unused power and thought she might be a witch - except, she said, if she were a man, these things she thought about would be ordinarily acceptable.
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man
woman
suppressed
witch
power
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A.S. Byatt |
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096cd75
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What do you hope? Desire is a dowsed fire True love a lie To a dusty shelf we aspire, I crave to die
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A.S. Byatt |
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9a4690c
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Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes?It was bot..
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A.S. Byatt |
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afd4d1d
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We run with milk and blood What we would give we spill The hungry mouths are raised We spill we fail to fill This cannot be restored This flow cannot redeem This white's not wiped away Though blanched we seem Howe'er I wipe and wipe Howe'er I frantic-scour The ghost of my spilled milk Makes my Air sour.
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A.S. Byatt |
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9d573c3
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he was always, as far as we can tell, the preux chevalier.
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A.S. Byatt |
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8283412
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Metamorphoses" he said, "are our way of showing, in riddles, that we know we are part of the animal world"
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A.S. Byatt |
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ece43dc
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This is were I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint, 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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A.S. Byatt |
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d42e21a
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Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hourglass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocit..
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A.S. Byatt |
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be5455c
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It is in the nature of the human frame to tire. Fortunately. Let us collude with necessity. Let us play with it.
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A.S. Byatt |
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3ca9ca1
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Too much meaning is bad at Toussaint." "Reason must sleep," said Christabel. "The stories come before the meanings," I said. "As I said, reason must sleep," she said again. I do not believe all these explanations. They diminish. The idea of Woman is less than brilliant Vivien, and the idea of Merlin will not allegorise into male wisdom. He is Merlin"
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A.S. Byatt |
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24fe678
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The words men used to describe the gods were the words they used for fetters or bonds, things which held the world together, within bounds, preventing the breakout of chaos and disorder.
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A.S. Byatt |
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49a860c
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here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw 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. Here
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A.S. Byatt |