A.S. Byatt Quotes

She 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.

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

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.

it [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, and the transformations and transmutations of grief, like rot in the earth-mould, like roots and other blind things moving in the grave.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

Good writing is always new.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...