15 A. S. Byatt Quotes

A. S. Byatt quotes

1. Despite the snow, despite the falling snow.

2. I shall from time to time write a small Clue - so that you may be the more thoroughly confounded.

3. And where may hide what came and loved our clay? as the Poet asked finely.

1. “Therefore,' said Loki the mockery, to the snake his daughter, 'we need to know everything, or at least as much as we can. The gods have secret runes to help in the hunt, or give victory in battle. They hammer, they slash. They do not study. I study. I know.”

2. “Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle. "I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-" "Beautiful." "Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening" "It needn't." "Even you - drew back - when we met. I expect that now. I use it." "Yes. But you don't want - do you - to be alone always. Or do you?" "I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on ;doing my work;. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand?”

3. “She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.”

4. “Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.”

5. “All these are true and none. The place is there Is what we name it, and is not. It is .”

6. “He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself. He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not.”

7. “ We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities. ”

8. “Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion.”

9. “She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped.”

10. “…it will be possible, in the time of the wolf, to kill the gods.”

11. “She looked, quickly, quickly, it was better than before, thanked him and averted her eyes. She came to trust him with her disintegration.”

12. “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.”