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

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

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

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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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Lists are a form of power.

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

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

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

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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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Tags : A. S. Byatt Quotes , Real Quotes , Thinking 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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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

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

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