Babel Tower Quotes

“Tell us about de Sade. You take him seriously as a thinker? A. You must. He is important. He represents the line from the Enlightenment philosophers who extol human reason and free will, in its cynical vein. He asks, If we are free to follow our passions, who can prevent us from following our desire to hurt others, to kill, to rape, to torture? Those are, he says, human passions; they are natural. Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, the freethinkers, lead, according to one view, to the guillotine and the Sadeian boudoir. Mr. Mason has understood this. He has shown it.”
― A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower

“She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.”
― a.s. byatt, Babel Tower

“I was no good at group life. I hated school.”
― A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower

“I wrote it for bookish children. Like myself, like you. For children despised because they read. To say, you can learn to live from books. Not didactically.”
― A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower

“I am an instrument of control and have been an instrument of terror, and I can tell you much of the nature of control, and terror, and control by terror, which you do not now think you need to know. But”
― A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower

“We will remake language in our own images,” cried Culvert, “with our own kissings and sippings will we make new names for what we will do and be, for the relations between ourselves, and the relations between ourselves and the world.”
― A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower