Quote

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

A. S. Byatt

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A. S. Byatt
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: August 24
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Sheffield
England
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy
Antonia Susan Drabble
Antonia Susan Duffy
Wrong
Subsequent
Happens
Trace
Things
Spoken
Never
Events
Would
Leave
Happen
Written
Indifferently
Though
Discernible

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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Lists are a form of power.
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Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
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There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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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.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
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You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
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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.
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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
A. S. Byatt
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
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I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.
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Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
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I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
A. S. Byatt