A. S. Byatt Quotes, Home Quotes, Safety Quotes

…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….

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

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

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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

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

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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

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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.

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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

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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.

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Tags : A. S. Byatt Quotes , Book Quotes , Glasses Quotes

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.

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

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

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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

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

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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

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Tags : A. S. Byatt Quotes , Self Quotes , Looks Quotes

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.

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Tags : A. S. Byatt Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Clouds Quotes

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.

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