“ 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 sil… A.S. Byatt
“ He hesitated. They were what stayed alive, when I’d been taught and examined everything else.Maud smiled then. Exactly. That’s it. What could survive our education. A.S. Byatt
“ 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 need… A.S. Byatt
“ Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned… A.S. Byatt
“ 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… A.S. Byatt
“ 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
“ 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
“ We run with milk and bloodWhat we would give we spillThe hungry mouths are raisedWe spill we fail to fillThis cannot be restoredThis flow cannot redeemThis white's not wiped awayThough blanched we see… A.S. Byatt
“ UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters’ education as seriously as his sons’. Humphry said that Dorothy—and Griselda—were s… A.S. Byatt
“ 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 no… A.S. Byatt
“ 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
“ The truth is, said Florence, that the women we are—have become—are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if change, and don’t, there will be no help for us. A.S. Byatt
“ The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither do… A.S. Byatt
“ 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
“ She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she… A.S. Byatt
“ She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of p… A.S. Byatt
“ No two faces are the same; this endless human diversity is one of the more hopeful things about the preponderant species on the planet. A.S. Byatt
“ 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… A.S. Byatt
“ 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 f… A.S. Byatt
