A. S. Byatt Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  A. S. Byatt

  Change, Book, People

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Jan 14, 2011

  51 Copy quote

• 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.

  A. S. Byatt

  Beach, Dark, Night

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from May 22, 2013

  44 Copy quote

• Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss

  A. S. Byatt

  Dark, Kissing, Night

  4 Copy quote

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

  A. S. Byatt

  Thinking, Reader

  9 Copy quote

• Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

  A. S. Byatt

  Safe, Mystery, Safe Places

  4 Copy quote

• Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

  A. S. Byatt

  Narrative

  A.S. Byatt (1997). “Still Life”, p.62, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

  A. S. Byatt

  Stories, Love Story, Ends

  "A comforting way of death" by A. S. Byatt, www.theguardian.com. November 8, 2002.

  9 Copy quote

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

  A. S. Byatt

  Fire, Possession, Humans

  "Possession". www.imdb.com. 2002.

  27 Copy quote

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

  A. S. Byatt

  Blood, Human Nature, Circulation

  "Best Story; Narrate Or Die" by A.S. Byatt, www.nytimes.com. April 18, 1999.

  13 Copy quote

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

  A. S. Byatt

  Powerful, Thinking, Color

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Dec 16, 2011

  16 Copy quote

• …my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.

  A. S. Byatt

  Peace, Solitude, Treasure

  5 Copy quote

• Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

  A. S. Byatt

  People, Listening, Age

  4 Copy quote

• Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

  A. S. Byatt

  Taken, Thinking, Blood

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  A. S. Byatt

  Dream, Song, Morning

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Aug 27, 2011

  23 Copy quote

• I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

  A. S. Byatt

  Believe, Thinking, People

  4 Copy quote

• Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

  A. S. Byatt

  Surprising

  A. S. Byatt (2012). “Angels & Insects: Two Novellas”, p.183, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

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

  A. S. Byatt

  Book, People

  6 Copy quote

• Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

  A. S. Byatt

  Book, Later In Life, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

  A. S. Byatt

  Work Out, Use, World

  "Writing a tale" by Sarah Gooderson, www.theguardian.com. September 22, 2005.

  5 Copy quote

• Lists are a form of power.

  A. S. Byatt

  Lists, Form

  8 Copy quote

• 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".

  A. S. Byatt

  Two, Three, Lasts

  5 Copy quote

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

  A. S. Byatt

  Art, Doe, Pleasure

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Jun 30, 2010

  20 Copy quote

• 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.

  A. S. Byatt

  Wisdom, Community, Ephemeral

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Dec 17, 2011

  4 Copy quote

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

  A. S. Byatt

  Greatness, Secret, Balance

  "An artificial paradise" by A. S. Byatt, www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2004.

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  A. S. Byatt

  Self, Looks, Moral Beliefs

  "That thinking feeling" by Marianne Brace, www.theguardian.com. June 9, 1996.

  9 Copy quote

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