A.S. Byatt

They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously," he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths.As it creaked up, Blackadder said, "That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.

Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.

You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

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__ 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.

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.

But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.

There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.

[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt.

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.