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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
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
Since
Domesticated
Hope
Utter
Women
Result
Anything
Neither
Must
Independent
Men
Expect
Failure
Results
Conventionally
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
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
I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A. S. Byatt
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
A. S. Byatt
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
A. S. Byatt
Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.
A. S. Byatt
It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.
A. S. Byatt
Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
A. S. Byatt
Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
A. S. Byatt
I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
A. S. Byatt
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
A. S. Byatt
On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.
A. S. Byatt
Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
A. S. Byatt
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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 not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
A. S. Byatt
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
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
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A. S. Byatt
I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
