A.S. Byatt Quotes

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

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. The...

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins...

The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, whic...

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.

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,...

But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world...

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 e...

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

I wish, said Dr Perholt to the djinn, I wish you would love me.You honor me, said the djinn, and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are...

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...

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.

Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

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

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 f...

He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which...

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic...

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold,...

It is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

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 unus...