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52fbac6
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Pomona's Tom's age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name--so dangerous, don't you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts.
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A.S. Byatt |
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e13ec7f
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I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of which they regard as as inspired by one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, one graceful attitude of body or mind, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say, 1821-1844--I have always believed this to be something of the masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you--no, I..
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love
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A.S. Byatt |
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11bfff7
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His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies.
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A.S. Byatt |
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fbaddf2
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I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither,
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A.S. Byatt |
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23247a3
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No two faces are the same; this endless human diversity is one of the more hopeful things about the preponderant species on the planet.
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A.S. Byatt |
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97dfdec
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I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?" "No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to."
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A.S. Byatt |
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9402ca4
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Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick film, a coloured oilcloth, spread over a cauldron of vapours which shaped and reshaped themselves into shadowy forms, embracing, threatening, glaring.
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A.S. Byatt |
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81e0f98
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Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don't come into it, much, for me. I do what I must." Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn't. "I imagine you don't talk to many of us, as against studying us in bulk. The dangerous masses. To be put in camps, and set to work on projects." "You are being unfair," said Charles/Karl. "You are mocking me." "We can do that, at least, if we dare." "Miss Warren," said Charles/Karl,..
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A.S. Byatt |
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65d29d4
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Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness." Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested. I was avoiding that word, because that precisely We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to
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A.S. Byatt |
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113b42f
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She was called Maria. She was a Maria Magdalena who washed away sins, and she was Venus Anadyomene to me, though she was ill-nourished I think since birth, my artist's eye saw she was puny, though my lover's eye saw her breasts as globes of milky marble, and the tuft between her legs as the bushes surrounding the gate to Paradise Lost--and Regained.
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A.S. Byatt |
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58c748b
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The truth is," said Florence, "that the women we are--have become--are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if change, and don't, there will be no help for us."
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A.S. Byatt |
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30ce5ac
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Ah," said Florence, grimly. "A woman has to be extraordinary, she can't just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can't have a degree."
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A.S. Byatt |
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e2581ea
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Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying.
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A.S. Byatt |
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b06434b
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Se amava quel viso non indulgente, era perche era netto, espressivo e risoluto. Vedeva, o gli sembrava di vedere, come tali qualita fossero state mascherate o soffocate da atteggiamenti piu convenzionali: una modestia simulata, un'appropriata pazienza, un disprezzo che si spacciava per calma. Al suo peggio - oh, lui la vedeva chiaramente, malgrado la possessione che esercitava su di lui - al suo peggio guardava in basso e di traverso e sorr..
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identity
love
possession
women-s-nature
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A.S. Byatt |
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a7420bc
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Julian occasionally thought that enjoying oneself was a very strenuous occupation.
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A.S. Byatt |
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5986cc4
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Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go neither forwards nor back.
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A.S. Byatt |
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a6d6464
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UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters' education as seriously as his sons'. Humphry said that Dorothy--and Griselda--were still only little girls. Hardly, said Skinner, smiling at the two serious young faces. Hardly. They would be young women any moment, he could see. His look made Dorothy feel unexpectedly heated, on her skin, and also inside her. She wriggled a..
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A.S. Byatt |
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4cff8f7
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You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that." "What I can't see--what I really can't see--is why everyone doesn't ask themselves that, all the time . How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see--and get told what the Bible says about the poor--and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats--and eating huge beefsteaks--I can't see it." "I have ..
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A.S. Byatt |
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48e1de8
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It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts.
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books
dust
librarians
library
library-books
london
pollution
victorian
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A.S. Byatt |
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9b225e0
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In the morning the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction, and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.
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A.S. Byatt |
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7cc986e
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There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They were a stationary form of violent movement.
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A.S. Byatt |
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d61bc3c
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God," said Benedict Fludd, "your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible--laughable, laughable--and the next, he is imperious." He stopped. He said "It is like the phases of the moon, maybe. Or the seasons of the sphere we live on, rolling in and out of the light, skeleton trees one day, and then snow, and afterwards the bright green veil and after that the full heat and shining. Only it is n..
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A.S. Byatt |
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173ddba
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Imagining the end of things, when you are a child, is perhaps impossible. The thin child, despite the war that was raging, was more afraid of eternal boredom, of doing nothing that mattered, of day after day going nowhere, than she was of death or the end of things. When she thought of death she thought of the little boy across the road who had died of diabetes. No one at school, told of this, knew how to respond. Some giggled. They shifted..
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2011
children-s-fears
death
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A.S. Byatt |
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af93bd2
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For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come "again" and began to learn to expect."
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A.S. Byatt |
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95c1cd6
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The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children..
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childhood
freud
golden-age
hesiod
infantile
nostalgia
prehistory
silver-age
victorians
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A.S. Byatt |
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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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lives
pleasures
reality
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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
power
suppressed
witch
woman
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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 |