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

— A.S. Byatt

The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.

— A.S. Byatt

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 individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

— A.S. Byatt

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.

— A.S. Byatt

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

— 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, Black adder said, "That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.

— A.S. Byatt

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

— A.S. Byatt

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queen, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote, and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, un unseen cottage, elastic-walled and gray round blind eyes.

— A.S. Byatt

This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.

— A.S. Byatt