“There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come,… — A.S. Byatt Copy Share Image
“Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its… — A.S. Byatt Copy Share
“Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle. "I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-" "Beautiful." "Yes, why not. You can become a property or an… — A.S. Byatt Copy Share
“She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.” — A.S. Byatt Copy Share Image
“Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history),… — A.S. Byatt Copy Share Image
“All these are true and none. The place is there Is what we name it, and is not. It is .” — A.S. Byatt Copy Share Image
“He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself. He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more… — A.S. Byatt Copy Share
“ We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than… — A.S. Byatt Copy Share Image
“Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had… — A.S. Byatt Copy Share
“She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate… — A.S. Byatt Copy Share Image
“She looked, quickly, quickly, it was better than before, thanked him and averted her eyes. She came to trust him with her disintegration.” — A.S. Byatt Copy Share Image
