A. S. Byatt Quotes

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"He 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. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Invisible #Skylines #Melting

"Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Reality #Direct #Lines

"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."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Results #Men #Independent

"Outside our small safe place flies mystery."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Safe #Mystery #Safe Places

"Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Narrative

"She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Moon And Sun #Dwarfs #Sorting

"I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently."

--- A. S. Byatt

#People #Thinking #Asks

"I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Writing #Hated #Novelists

"I was no good at being a child."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Children

"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."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Reap #Species #Instant

"Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Realising #Cyclists #Self Righteous

"In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Thinking #Feels #Joining

"Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Legends #Greatness #Secret

"I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Thinking #Prize #Curiosity

"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"

--- A. S. Byatt

#Purple #Lovers #Secret Places

"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."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Green #Lovers #Stones

"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."

--- A. S. Byatt

#People #Book #Syllabus

"I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Reason #Restful #World

"I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Thinking #Wednesday #Knows

"There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Goes On #Written #Would Be

"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 and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Speech #Winter #Passion

"I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Human Relations #Stupid #Pessimist

"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?"

--- A. S. Byatt

#Trivial Things #Possession #Ends

"He felt changed, but there was no one to tell."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Changed #Felt

"I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Thinking #People #Now And Then

"I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants."

--- A. S. Byatt

#I Can #Chaos #Writing

"I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not."

--- A. S. Byatt

#People #Book

"As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Musketeers #Terror #Nice

"One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Reason #Reality #Talking

"Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm."

--- A. S. Byatt

#Action #Harm #Avert

"I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers."

--- A. S. Byatt

#People #Book #Dangerous

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