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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

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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
Great
Dignity
Comforter
Though
Rigid
Suffering
Lend
Whatever
Heartbreak
Pain
Greatly
Certain
Frame
Comforters
Doe
Occasionally
Ennoble
May
Manner
Hardens

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She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
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You are safe with me. I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
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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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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
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...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.
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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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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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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
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I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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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.
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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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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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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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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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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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