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

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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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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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Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
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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 think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.
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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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Lists are a form of power.
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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 am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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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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I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
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I was no good at being a child.
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I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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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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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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