Quote

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

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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
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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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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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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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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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I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
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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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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
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Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.
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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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That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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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.
A. S. Byatt