Quote

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.

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
Much
Everyone
Behalf
Kind
Understand
Flood
Good
Death
Disgusting
Seems
Logical
Earth
Son
Whole
Seem
Preyed
Done
Nice
Sinfulness
Children
Child
Condemn

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
A. S. Byatt
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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?
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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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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
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I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
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I don't only write about English literature I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
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I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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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
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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
A. S. Byatt
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The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
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I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
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Everything is surprising, rightly seen.
A. S. Byatt
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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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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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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
A. S. Byatt
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
A. S. Byatt