A.s. Byatt Quotes

For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.

~ A.s. Byatt

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

Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a finely-striped red and white shirt. Val’s legs followed, in powder-blue stockings and saxe-blue shoes, under the limp hem of a crêpey mustard-coloured dress, printed with blue moony flowers. The four feet advanced and retreated, retreated and advanced, the male feet insisting towards the basement stairs, the female feet resisting, parrying. Roland opened the door and went into the area, fired mostly by what always got him, pure curiosity as to what the top half looked like.

~ A.s. Byatt

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 simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.

~ A.s. Byatt

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

~ A.s. Byatt

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

~ A.s. Byatt

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...

~ A.s. Byatt

Good writing is always new.

~ A.s. Byatt

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].

~ A.s. Byatt

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.

~ A.s. Byatt

A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.

~ A.s. Byatt

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.

~ A.s. Byatt

My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.

~ A.s. Byatt

The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children.

~ A.s. Byatt

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 in love;when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel - or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I could diagnose this state of ;being in love; which they regard as ;most particular; as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, ;item; one graceful attitude of body or mind, ;item; one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say 1821-1844 – I have always believed this ;in love; to be of something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet who assumes and informs both.

~ A.s. Byatt

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

~ A.s. Byatt

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

~ A.s. Byatt

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

~ A.s. Byatt

He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination’s work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in sleep, or would fight for.

~ A.s. Byatt

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.

~ A.s. Byatt

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.

~ A.s. Byatt

This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, 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.

~ A.s. Byatt

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

~ A.s. Byatt

[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt.

~ A.s. Byatt

There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.

~ A.s. Byatt

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.

~ A.s. Byatt

As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.

~ A.s. Byatt

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

~ A.s. Byatt

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.

~ A.s. Byatt

Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

~ A.s. Byatt

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

~ A.s. Byatt

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

~ A.s. Byatt

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on.

~ A.s. Byatt

She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.

~ A.s. Byatt

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.

~ A.s. Byatt

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

~ A.s. Byatt

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.

~ A.s. Byatt

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, un unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.

~ A.s. Byatt

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

~ A.s. Byatt

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.

~ A.s. Byatt