... the owl-dark moon-glimmered bedroom...
Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt
Poems are the ghosts of sensations.
Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt
You are accompanied through life... not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.
Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt
Did you know, sweet ladies, that the iambic pentameter embodies, as it were, the number of heartbeats between a breath taken in and the same breath sighed out? Shakespeare's verse is human time.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
She turned back to the beginning of the book and began wildly to read it all, as though her self depended on it.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
He explained how Elizabeth's motto, semper eadem, had in his mind come to be associated with the homogeneity of stone, on the one hand, and the sempiternities of the Golden Age, on the other. Whereas Mary Queen of Scots's motto, eadem mutata resurgam, I shall arise, the same transmuted, he felt was Christian and much less rock-like that Elizabeth's pagan reliance on her own eternal identity.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
You could not do, and need not attempt, what it required you to do, see the unseen, realise the unreal, speak what was not, and that yet it did it so that unheard melodies seemed infinitely preferable to any one might ever hope to hear. Human beings, she had thought, even as a very small child faced with The Lady of Shalott, might so easily never have hit on the accidental idea of making unreal verbal forms, they might have just lived, and dreamed, and tried to tell the truth.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
They talked about beauty is truth, truth beauty.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
They begun to talk about when Keats required his reader to see an urn and when a landscape, what colours he called up and what he left to choice, and moved from there to the nature of the difficulty of seeing what is formed to be 'seen' by language alone, marble men and maidens, the heifer and altar, a burning forehead and a parching tongue, cold pastoral.
'Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard
Are sweeter.'
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
He wanted everyone, this spring, to make the land remember its old sweetness and loveliness, to make the too-much loved earth more lovely with the real old flowers, the sweet-smelling ones, lavender, wallflowers, lad's-love, clove gilliflower and matted pink.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
He remembered Ophelia. All those nights, stripping the wrecked garlands and crumpled white dress from his body, the wrong body, he had been in such trouble, his hands not his hands, the only words in his head her chilly plaints, his hair not his hair, prickling ghoststruck under the mat of long blonde hair he lifted off, nightly. Her breaking song he heard from some lost part of himself crying to get out, to come back in, which?
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
Rose and viridian.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
Very few people, he said, knew what they were really capable of. Most were afraid to find out. And afraid that circumstances might nevertheless force them to know. Better...to walk out and face it, purposefully, for a good reason.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
There is more truth in King Lear as far as I know than in all the gospels put together.
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
Everybody needs, as it were, an unreal world to complete the real world.
A.S. Byatt, Interview
Latin and Greek had given him a taste for languages. Writing gave him a taste for poetry.
Angels and Insects (”Morpho Eugenia”) by A.S. Byatt
He looked at her and she looked back, intently. They saw each other clearly.
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt