Top 160 A. S. Byatt Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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106. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

108. “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

109. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

122. “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

123. “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

124. “Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.”

— A. S. Byatt

125. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

127. “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

128. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

135. “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

136. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

142. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

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

— A. S. Byatt

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

— A. S. Byatt

149. “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

150. “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