01c. 1964 ADYou wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
02c. 1964 AD[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 / quote ↗
03c. 1964 ADThere are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
04c. 1964 ADBut 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 / quote ↗
05c. 1964 ADAs 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 / quote ↗
06c. 1964 ADThat is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
07c. 1964 ADShe 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 / quote ↗
08c. 1964 ADThink of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
09c. 1964 ADThey did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously," he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths.As it creaked up, Blackadder said, "That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
10c. 1964 ADI do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
12c. 1964 ADPerhaps 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 / quote ↗
13c. 1964 ADShe is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
14c. 1964 ADBut 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 / quote ↗
15c. 1964 ADIt 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 / quote ↗
16c. 1964 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1964 ADThink 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1964 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
19c. 1964 ADIt 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1964 ADShe grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
21c. 1964 ADOnce 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.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
22c. 1964 ADIn the end it wins a king's daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself clasping a beautiful prince, all singed and soot-black. Christabel says, 'And if he regretted his armoury of spines and his quick wild wits, history does not relate, for we must go no further, having reached the happy end.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
24c. 1964 ADThe true exercise of freedom is-can-nily and wisely and with grace-to move inside what space confines-and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.A.S. Byatt / quote ↗
