The Children's Book Quotes

“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

“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

“...failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements... Any one of the old four - earth, air, fire, water - can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter - months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children. They roamed the woods and fields, built hiding-places and climbed trees, hunted, fished, rode ponies and bicycles, with no other company than that of other children.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare’s rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet.”
― 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

“You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“It was hard for a man and a woman to be fiends with no under thought or glimpsed prospect of sex. They wanted to be friends. It was almost a matter of principle. She was as intelligent as any Fellow of King's - though he thought she did not know it - he was in love with her mind as it followed clues through labyrinths. Love is, among many other things, a response to energy, and Griselda's mind was precise and energetic. He wanted to make love to her too.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters’ education as seriously as his sons’. Humphry said that Dorothy—and Griselda—were still only little girls. Hardly, said Skinner, smiling at the two serious young faces. Hardly. They would be young women any moment, he could see. His look made Dorothy feel unexpectedly heated, on her skin, and also inside her. She wriggled a little and sat straighter. Griselda said she didn’t think her parents saw any need for her to be educated. Skinner said, it should be enough that she wanted to be educated.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Olive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its animated kitchen and pocket-sized garden, the ever-present stink of the ash pits across the yards, and the grime that floated onto the strips of lace curtain. She had packed it away in what she saw in her mind as a roped parcel, in oiled silk, with red wax seals on the knots, which a woman like and unlike herself carried perpetually over a windswept moor, sometimes on her head, sometimes held before her on two arms, like the cushion on which the regalia lie at coronations. This vision was not a story. The woman never arrived, and the parcel was never opened. The weather was grey and the air was turbulent. When Olive Wellwood found her mind heading in that direction, she was able to move imaginary points on an imaginary rail and shunt her mind away from “there” and back to Todefright, with its penumbra of wild woods and flying elementals.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that.”
“What I can’t see—what I really can’t see—is why everyone doesn’t ask themselves that, all the time . How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see—and get told what the Bible says about the poor—and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats—and eating huge beefsteaks—I can’t see it.”
“I have brought a book for you to read. I think probably you should not let it be seen in your home. But I think it will speak to you.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn't easy for them being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then there's the problem of being different sexes. I think if they are good friends, then whatever else they are - or are not - is better.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction into bad lying.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“The truth is,” said Florence, “that the women we are—have become—are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if we change, and they don’t, there will be no help for us.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“She was called Maria. She was a Maria Magdalena who washed away sins, and she was Venus Anadyomene to me, though she was ill-nourished I think since birth, my artist’s eye saw she was puny, though my lover’s eye saw her breasts as globes of milky marble, and the tuft between her legs as the bushes surrounding the gate to Paradise Lost—and Regained.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and faked. He was afraid of being isolated and solitary, which he feared was his fate. He was certainly not himself an object of desire to other boys, as far as he knew—and he was knowing.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don’t come into it, much, for me. I do what I must.” Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn’t. “I imagine you don’t talk to many of us, as against studying us in bulk. The dangerous masses. To be put in camps, and set to work on projects.” “You are being unfair,” said Charles/Karl. “You are mocking me.” “We can do that, at least, if we dare.” “Miss Warren,” said Charles/Karl, “I wish you would not talk as though you were a group, or a class, or a committee. I should like to be talking to you as a person.” “Can you?” “Why should I not?” “For every reason. I am both working-class and not respectable. I am a Fallen Woman. I have a daughter. You don’t want to be talking to me as if I were a person, Mr. Wellwood.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“You do look like a china doll,” said Dorothy, “one in a fairy story, standing on a shelf, that’s loved hopelessly by a tin soldier or a presumptuous mouse.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Ah,” said Florence, grimly. “A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don’t come into it, much, for me. I do what I must.” Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn’t.
“I imagine you don’t talk to many of us, as against studying us in bulk. The dangerous masses. To be put in camps, and set to work on projects.”
“You are being unfair,” said Charles/Karl. “You are mocking me.”
“We can do that, at least, if we dare.”
“Miss Warren,” said Charles/Karl, “I wish you would not talk as though you were a group, or a class, or a committee. I should like to be talking to you as a person.”
“Can you?”
“Why should I not?”
“For every reason. I am both working-class and not respectable. I am a Fallen Woman. I have a daughter. You don’t want to be talking to me as if I were a person, Mr. Wellwood.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book