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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.

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
Literature
Including
Language
Havens
Tell
Haven
Book
Lived
Many
Number
Children
Students
Really
Numbers
People
Since
Surprising

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.
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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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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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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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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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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
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Lists are a form of power.
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Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.
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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.
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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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A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows This is I. An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, This is not I. Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
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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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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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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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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 like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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Things are not what they seem.
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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.
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