Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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.
A. S. Byatt
Image
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
A. S. Byatt
Image
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 what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.
A. S. Byatt
Image
...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
A. S. Byatt
Image
I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
Image
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
A. S. Byatt
Image
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
A. S. Byatt