{"author":"A.S. Byatt","author_id":"A.S.+Byatt","total_quotes":48,"quotes":[{"text":"Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["vocabulary","words"],"id":275,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"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.","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["art","identity","individual","nation"],"id":37600,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["fiction","intellectual","mythology","norse"],"id":65245,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["fairy-tales","fairy-tales-for-adults"],"id":69065,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["memories"],"id":70906,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"…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….","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["words","writing"],"id":79344,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"In the end it wins a king's daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself clasping a beautiful prince, all singed and soot-black. Christabel says, 'And if he regretted his armoury of spines and his quick wild wits, history does not relate, for we must go no further, having reached the happy end.","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["fairy-tales","happy-endings"],"id":93927,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["ex-lovers","lovers"],"id":108758,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["1990","academia","madness","maud-bailey","obsession","scholarship"],"id":113098,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"},{"text":"Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].","author":"A.S. Byatt","tags":["art","time"],"id":123089,"author_id":"A.S.+Byatt"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":48,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}