Absence Quote by A. S. Byatt

“I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.” quote by A. S. Byatt — Download Open image

“I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.”

A. S. Byatt

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More by A. S. Byatt

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

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“He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination’s work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her…

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Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood… storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all…

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“Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed…

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I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

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I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will…

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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world,…

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I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

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I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've…

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“When the morning light came into the room it found them curled together in a nest of red and white sheets. It revealed also marks, all over the pale cool skin: handprints around the narrow waist, sliding impressions from delicate strokes, like weals, raised rosy discs where his lips had rested lightly. He cried out, when he saw her, that…

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Distance sometimes endears friendship, and absence sweeteneth it.

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There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the…

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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

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Young men have strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most…

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It is suggested that in domestic violence at least the presence or absence of a firearm, or of any other type of weapon, is of far less importance to the outcome than the passion generated in the attacker. The man who has lost control will cause serious injuries in many cases, quite irrespective of the weapon he uses and regardless…

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The absence of God in most spheres of life is perceived to be normal, and even Christians feel it as normal - which is…

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Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are…

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