226 Quotes by A. S. Byatt

We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.

It’s a terrible poison, writing.

His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap’s versifying.

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Iron bars make a cage all right, and the more you look at them or reproduce them the more you know it’s a real cage.

There will always be people who will slash open the other cheek when it is turned to them.

For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come “again” and began to learn to expect.

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.