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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.

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
Mind
Dependent
Defined
Kept
Wife
Dark
Annihilating
Persons
Conventionally
Person
Humiliating
Much
Betrayed

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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
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I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
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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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Good writing is always new.
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The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.
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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 not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
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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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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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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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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.
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Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
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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.
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It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
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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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