Top 150 A. S. Byatt Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

104. “Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.”

— A. S. Byatt

105. “Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare’s rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet.”

— A. S. Byatt

106. “If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history.”

— A. S. Byatt

107. “Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go neither forwards nor back.”

— A. S. Byatt

108. “Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction .”

— A. S. Byatt

109. “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

110. “There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They were a stationary form of violent movement.”

— A. S. Byatt

111. “The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic.”

— A. S. Byatt

112. “Maud considered. She said, ‘In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight – whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose – to imagine – he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely – but not in the large plan -.”

— A. S. Byatt

113. “Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them.”

— A. S. Byatt

114. “I think we’ve had rather too much dirt rather than not enough. That’s not a prudish English remark, but a statement of saturation. These up-and-coming young men,” she splutters. “Penelope Fitzgerald – they think, ‘Ah! Middle-aged lady with frizzy hair and a nice smile; she must be writing tastefully.’ I say she’s writing against taste, quite savagely. But they don’t pick it up because they’re brash young men poncing about, waving their blood and thunder and condoms!”

— A. S. Byatt

115. “The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.”

— A. S. Byatt

116. “He began to walk into the pottery, which had been the dairy. He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn’t give up their wrath, even if they needed to.”

— A. S. Byatt

117. “I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.”

— A. S. Byatt

118. “Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means – and with absolute sincerity – but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems.”

— A. S. Byatt

119. “She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.”

— A. S. Byatt

120. “Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.”

— A. S. Byatt

121. “His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies.”

— A. S. Byatt

122. “For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come “again” and began to learn to expect.”

— A. S. Byatt

123. “Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and faked. He was afraid of being isolated and solitary, which he feared was his fate. He was certainly not himself an object of desire to other boys, as far as he knew – and he was knowing.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

125. “Randolph Henry Ash’s Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of resurrection. Lord Leighton had painted her, distraught and floating, a golden figure in a tunnel of darkness. Blackadder.”

— A. S. Byatt

126. “Infatti devi sapere che io avevo un fratello gemello, bello come il giorno, e gentile come un cerbiatto, e sano come pane fresco e burro.”

— A. S. Byatt

127. “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

128. “Are there fish?” “All you can see is imperfections and reflections.”

— A. S. Byatt

129. “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

130. “Now I am not saying – Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker’s imagination nothing can live for us – whether alive or dead, or once alive and now dead, or waiting to be brought to life –.”

— A. S. Byatt

131. “Val was eating cornflakes. She ate very little else, at home. They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool.”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

133. “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

134. “This agreed – may we not, in some circumscribed way – briefly, perhaps, probably – though it is Love’s Nature to know itself eternal – and in confined spaces too – may we not steal some – I almost wrote small, but it will never be that – some great happiness? 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.”

— A. S. Byatt

135. “But if there are spirits, I do not see why they are not everywhere, or may not be presumed to be so. You could argue that their voices may well be muffled by solid brick walls and thick plush furnishings and house-proud antimacassars. But the mahogany-polishers and the drapers’ clerks are as much in need of salvation – as much desirous of assurance of a afterlife – as poets or peasants, in the last resort.”

— A. S. Byatt

136. “And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn’t even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams – that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with unused power and thought she might be a witch – except, she said, if she were a man, these things she thought about would be ordinarily acceptable.”

— A. S. Byatt

137. “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

138. “So now his love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information.”

— A. S. Byatt

139. “I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem.”

— A. S. Byatt

140. “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

141. “It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon.”

— A. S. Byatt

142. “Ze probeerde zich zondig te voelen. Maar haar geest wendde zich af, naar waar hij levend was.”

— A. S. Byatt

143. “Do you know – the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination.”

— A. S. Byatt

144. “I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on.”

— A. S. Byatt

145. “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

146. “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

147. “He made the analogy, sometimes, almost bitterly, between Harald’s collection of wing-cases and empty ribcages, elephant’s feet and Paradise plumes, and Harald’s interminably circular book on Design, which rambled on from difficulty to difficulty, from momentarily illuminated clearing to prickling thicket of honest doubt.”

— A. S. Byatt

148. “And you say – so kind you are – “I love you. I love you.” – and I believe – but who is she – who is “you”?”

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

150. “She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature – at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out on that night Weep, Weep, the great god Pan is dead.”

— A. S. Byatt