Quote

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.

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
Life
Pleasure
Pleasures
Simple
Granted
Art
Daily
Thought
None
Together
Taste
May
Please
Criticise
Take
Higher
Weave
Never
Days
Forbid

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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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.
A. S. Byatt
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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
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Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A. S. Byatt
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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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In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Things are not what they seem.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A. S. Byatt
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Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A. S. Byatt
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I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
A. S. Byatt
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No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
A. S. Byatt
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
A. S. Byatt
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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.
A. S. Byatt
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
A. S. Byatt
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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
A. S. Byatt