A.s. byatt Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: A.S. Byatt
Quotes of Author: A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt _ The Djinn in the Nightingale's
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.
book-quote fairy-tales-for-adults
A.S. Byatt _ Possession
A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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A.S. Byatt _ The Virgin in the Garden
...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
book-quote opposite
A.S. Byatt _ Possession
Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance , and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.
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A.S. Byatt _ Possession
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.
book-quote love here-and-now
A.S. Byatt _ The Children's Book
Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
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A.S. Byatt _ The Virgin in the Garden
Lists are a form of power.
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A.S. Byatt _ Possession
How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.
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A.S. Byatt _ Possession
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.
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A.S. Byatt _ Possession
Literary critics make natural detectives.
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A.S. Byatt _ Possession
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".
book-quote truth thoughts
A.S. Byatt _ Possession
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.
book-quote knowledge wisdom