Top 160 A. S. Byatt Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

53. “It’s a terrible poison, writing.”

— A. S. Byatt

54. “You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.”

— A. S. Byatt

55. “They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures –.”

— A. S. Byatt

56. “Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past.”

— A. S. Byatt

57. “Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.”

— A. S. Byatt

58. “The practitioners of ‘dry’ art admire myth and symbol, precision and coherence; they would, theoretically, be more excited by an interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays which offered them a beautifully plotted, ‘containing’ framework of themes and recurrent symbols, than by one which placed its main emphasis on Shakespeare’s skill in reproducing the accidental, the idiosyncratic happenings of life, or his power to arouse in the audience an immediate emotional attachment to Falstaff.”

— A. S. Byatt

59. “Reason must sleep,” said Christabel.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

61. “We might do better if we saw art as a technique, not a mystique.”

— A. S. Byatt

62. “I hate people who tell me I am to have a surprise and will not tell me what it is.’ ‘You do not like suspense?’ ‘No. No, I don’t. I like to know where I am. I am afraid of surprises.’ – Morpho Eugenia.”

— A. S. Byatt

63. “The movement of light and dark, the order of day and night and the seasons, was thus, the thin child understood, a product of fright, of the wolves in the mind. Order came from bonds and threatening teeth and claws.”

— A. S. Byatt

64. “Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hourglass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference.”

— A. S. Byatt

65. “It is odd, when I think of it, that in chess the female may make the large runs and cross freely in all ways – in life it is much otherwise.”

— A. S. Byatt

66. “It is in the nature of the human frame to tire. Fortunately. Let us collude with necessity. Let us play with it.”

— A. S. Byatt

67. “As 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

68. “What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to creep under the net.4.”

— A. S. Byatt

69. “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.”

— A. S. Byatt

70. “Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others.”

— A. S. Byatt

71. “The aspect of this transcendent reality upon which, both in terms of liberal morals, and of the art of the novel, Miss Murdoch lays most emphasis, is what she calls the ‘opacity of persons’.”

— A. S. Byatt

72. “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

73. “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.”

— A. S. Byatt

74. “Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.”

— A. S. Byatt

75. “Did we not – did you not flame, and I catch fire?”

— A. S. Byatt

76. “Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.”

— A. S. Byatt

77. “Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance.”

— A. S. Byatt

78. “What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don’t read the books.”

— A. S. Byatt

79. “Everything is surprising, rightly seen.”

— A. S. Byatt

80. “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

81. “In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.”

— A. S. Byatt

82. “Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.”

— A. S. Byatt

83. “Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.”

— A. S. Byatt

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

88. “Literary critics make natural detectives.”

— A. S. Byatt

89. “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

90. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

94. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

99. “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

100. “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