64 Quotes by A.S. Byatt

Frederica also thought, for she had been there many times, that if this was a beginning, it was the beginning of an ending, that was the way it went.

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

-in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish onesensation, fire, from the other, frost.

I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.

I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender it - this was the wise saying of Sir Thomas Browne.

On the first occasion Mrs Papagay had met her, there had been a discussion of the process of grief, and Mrs Jesse had nodded sagely, "I know that. I have felt that,' like a kind of tragic chorus. 'I have felt everything; I know everything. I don’t want any new emotion. I know what it is to feel like a stoan.