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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.
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
Edges
Failing
Color
Names
Powerful
Language
Fails
Think
Colors
Thinking
Edge
More quotes by A. S. Byatt
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
A. S. Byatt
The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
A. S. Byatt
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
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
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
A. S. Byatt
She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
A. S. Byatt
I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
A. S. Byatt
Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
A. S. Byatt
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.
A. S. Byatt
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
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
I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?
A. S. Byatt
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
A. S. Byatt
I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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
In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
A. S. Byatt
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
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
It's a terrible poison, writing.
A. S. Byatt
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
