64 Quotes by A.S. Byatt

It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon.

You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.

Good writing is always new.

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

There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.

I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn't easy for them being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then there's the problem of being different sexes. I think if they are good friends, then whatever else they are - or are not - is better.

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.

Did we not—did you not flame, and I catch fire?

The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. ...The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless.