" There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been."
— A.S. Byatt

"No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession)

""What is it my dear?"

"Ah, how can we bear it?"

"Bear what?"

"This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?"

"We can be quiet together, and pretend - since it is only the beginning - that we have all the time in the world."

"And every day we shall have less. And then none."

"Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"

"No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.""
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books."
— A.S. Byatt

"They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side...He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing."
— A.S. Byatt

"Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by."
— A.S. Byatt

"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."
— A.S. Byatt

"I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?"
— A.S. Byatt (Possession)

"Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one
sensation, fire, from the other, frost."
— A.S. Byatt (Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice)

"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 black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a finely-striped red and white shirt. Val’s legs followed, in powder-blue stockings and saxe-blue shoes, under the limp hem of a crêpey mustard-coloured dress, printed with blue moony flowers. The four feet advanced and retreated, retreated and advanced, the male feet insisting towards the basement stairs, the female feet resisting, parrying. Roland opened the door and went into the area, fired mostly by what always got him, pure curiosity as to what the top half looked like."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew…."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"Lists are a form of power."
— A.S. Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden: A Novel)

"Mine the long night
The secret place
Where lovers meet
In long embrace
In purple dark
In silvered kiss
Forget the world
And grasp your bliss"
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept."
— A.S. Byatt (The Children's Book)

"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 he had hurt her. No, she said, she was part icewoman, it was her nature, she had an icewoman's skin that responded to every touch by blossoming red. Sasan still stared, and repeated, I have hurt you. No, no, said Fiammarosa, they are the marks of pleasure, pure pleasure. I shall cover them up, for only we ourselves should see our happiness.

But inside her a little melted pool of water slopped and swayed where she had been solid and shining."
— A.S. Byatt (Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice)

"Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love indifference and dislike, also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forbears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else, too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come."
— A.S. Byatt

"He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"Things are not what they seem."
— A.S. Byatt

"His forty-third year. His small time's end. His time-
Who saw Infinity through the countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it."
— A.S. Byatt

"Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation."
— A.S. Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden: A Novel)

"A metamorphosis. . . . The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art."
— A.S. Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden: A Novel)

"'Contemporary' was in those days [1953]synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977]."
— A.S. Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden: A Novel)

"She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was inside the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower."
— A.S. Byatt (Angels & Insects: Two Novellas)

"The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. Cuvier has imparted flesh and motion and appetites to the defunct Megatherium, whilst the living ears of M.M. Michelet and Renan, of Mr. Carlyle and the Brothers Grimm, have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices. I myself, with the aid of the imagination, have worked a little in that line, have ventriloquised, have lent my voice to, and mixt my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman."
— A.S. Byatt

"She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated."
— A.S. Byatt (The Children's Book)

"You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world. "
— A.S. Byatt (The Children's Book)

"…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"He had said she was provocative; so she was, she needed to prove she was there to be seen; but the proof always, contradictorily, drove her to further uncertain agony of guilt and self-distaste."
— A.S. Byatt (The Game: A Novel)