Top 150 A. S. Byatt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “It 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

53. “In the morning the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction, and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

55. “She was called Maria. She was a Maria Magdalena who washed away sins, and she was Venus Anadyomene to me, though she was ill-nourished I think since birth, my artist’s eye saw she was puny, though my lover’s eye saw her breasts as globes of milky marble, and the tuft between her legs as the bushes surrounding the gate to Paradise Lost – and Regained.”

— A. S. Byatt

56. “One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.”

— A. S. Byatt

57. “Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.”

— A. S. Byatt

58. “Literary critics make natural detectives.”

— A. S. Byatt

59. “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.”

— A. S. Byatt

60. “I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.”

— A. S. Byatt

61. “No two faces are the same; this endless human diversity is one of the more hopeful things about the preponderant species on the planet.”

— A. S. Byatt

62. “There will always be people who will slash open the other cheek when it is turned to them.”

— A. S. Byatt

63. “All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.”

— A. S. Byatt

64. “A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.”

— A. S. Byatt

65. “Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.”

— A. S. Byatt

66. “An odd phrase, “by heart,” he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.”

— A. S. Byatt

67. “The sea was as black as basalt, covered with churning foam, ice-green, clotted cream, shivering high walls full of needles of air going up and up and crashing down on other walls of water on the crumbling coasts of the world.”

— A. S. Byatt

68. “How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one’s own existence.”

— A. S. Byatt

69. “Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick film, a coloured oilcloth, spread over a cauldron of vapours which shaped and reshaped themselves into shadowy forms, embracing, threatening, glaring.”

— A. S. Byatt

70. “But 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

71. “Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.”

— A. S. Byatt

72. “The 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

73. “Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer – like Macbeth’s witches – mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book – telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.”

— A. S. Byatt

74. “He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not.”

— A. S. Byatt

75. “Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.”

— A. S. Byatt

76. “There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.”

— A. S. Byatt

77. “Everybody’s possibilities solidify round them and become limitations.”

— A. S. Byatt

78. “A surprising number of people – including many students of literature – will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children.”

— A. S. Byatt

79. “It’s exhausting. When everything’s a deliberate political stance. Even if it’s interesting.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

81. “The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject’s life...”

— A. S. Byatt

82. “Iron bars make a cage all right, and the more you look at them or reproduce them the more you know it’s a real cage.”

— A. S. Byatt

83. “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.”

— A. S. Byatt

84. “There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy skull on skull, through soft skin and softer flesh. He thought: skulls separate people. In this one sense, I could say, they would say, I lose myself in her. But in that bone box, she thinks and thinks, as I think in mine, things the other won’t hear, can’t hear, though we go on like this for sixty years. What does she think I am? He had no idea. He had no idea what she was.”

— A. S. Byatt

85. “How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence.”

— A. S. Byatt

86. “Ah,” said Florence, grimly. “A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree.”

— A. S. Byatt

87. “You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.”

— A. S. Byatt

88. “Metamorphoses” he said, “are our way of showing, in riddles, that we know we are part of the animal world.”

— A. S. Byatt

89. “Pedro of Portugal’s rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed beside him on his travels, leather-brown and skeletal, crowned with lace and gold circlet, hung about with chains of diamonds and pearls, her bone-fingers fantastically ringed.”

— A. S. Byatt

90. “Fowles has said that the nineteenth-century narrator was assuming the omniscience of a god. I rather think that the opposite is the case – this kind of fictive narrator can creep closer to the feelings and the inner life of characters – as well as providing a Greek chorus – than any first person mimicry.”

— A. S. Byatt

91. “Julian occasionally thought that enjoying oneself was a very strenuous occupation.”

— A. S. Byatt

92. “Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone’s primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place.”

— A. S. Byatt

93. “History, writing, infect after a time a man’s sense of himself...”

— A. S. Byatt

94. “Pomona’s Tom’s age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name – so dangerous, don’t you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts.”

— A. S. Byatt

95. “She didn’t like to be talked about. Equally, she didn’t like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people’s feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.”

— A. S. Byatt

96. “Julian was good at being in love. But he was clever enough to know that what he really liked about being in love was the state of unconsummated tension... One had to believe that these lovely creatures were, in potentia, the longed for intimate friend from whom nothing need be hidden, by whom everything would be understood, forgiven and admired. But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated.”

— A. S. Byatt

97. “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

98. “Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.”

— A. S. Byatt

99. “The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.”

— A. S. Byatt

100. “Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying.”

— A. S. Byatt