A.S. Byatt Quote
Why do you go cold? He kept his voice gentle. I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and- Beautiful. Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening It needn't. Even you - drew back - when we met. I expect that now. I use it. Yes. But you don't want - do you - to be alone always. Or do you?I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on ;doing my work;. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand?
Why do you go cold? He kept his voice gentle. I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and- Beautiful. Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening It needn't. Even you - drew back - when we met. I expect that now. I use it. Yes. But you don't want - do you - to be alone always. Or do you?I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on ;doing my work;. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand?
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About A.S. Byatt
After attending the University of Cambridge, she married in 1959 and moved to Durham. It was during Byatt's time at university that she began working on her first two novels, subsequently published by Chatto & Windus as Shadow of a Sun (1964; reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun) and The Game (1967). Byatt took a teaching job in 1972 to help pay for the education of her son. In the same week she accepted, a drunk driver killed her son as he walked home from school. He was 11 years of age. Byatt spent a symbolic 11 years teaching, then began full-time writing in 1983. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first of The Quartet, a tetralogy of novels that continued with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).
Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance received the 1990 Booker Prize, while her short story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) received the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize and won the 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her critical work includes two studies of Dame Iris Murdoch (who was a friend and mentor), Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976). Her other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970) and Portraits in Fiction (2001).
Byatt was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in 2002, the Erasmus Prize in 2016, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2017 and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award in 2018. She was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.