Quote

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

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
Wisdom
Reaps
Existence
Joins
Dies
Ephemeral
Community
Reap
Individual
Appears
Thought
Instant
Fruit
Species
Modifies

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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Things are not what they seem.
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Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
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Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
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It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
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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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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
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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.
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
A. S. Byatt
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Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.
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We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
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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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
A. S. Byatt
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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
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
A. S. Byatt
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A. S. Byatt
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A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
A. S. Byatt
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For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
A. S. Byatt