A. S. Byatt Quotes, Change Quotes, Book Quotes

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

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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

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

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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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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

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

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

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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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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

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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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Lists are a form of power.

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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.

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

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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 the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

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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