“She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was inside the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from Angels and Insects
“The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. ...The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from Angels and Insects
“You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from Angels and Insects
“You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from Angels and Insects
“On the first occasion Mrs Papagay had met her, there had been a discussion of the process of grief, and Mrs Jesse had nodded sagely, "I know that. I have felt that,' like a kind of tragic chorus. 'I have felt everything; I know everything. I don’t want any new emotion. I know what it is to feel like a stoan.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from Angels and Insects
“And Swedenborg himself saw birds during his sojourns in the Spirit World and it was revealed to him that — in the Grand Man — rational concepts are seen as birds. Because the head corresponds to the heavens and the air. He actually experienced in his body the fall of certain angels who had formed wrong opinions in their community about thoughts and influx — he felt a terrible tremor in his sinews and bones — and saw one dark and ugly bird and two fine and beautiful. And these solid birds were the thoughts of the angels, as he saw them in the world of his senses, beautiful reasonings and ugly falses. For at every level everything corresponds, from the most purely material to the most purely divine in the Divine Human.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from Angels and Insects
“ls the Conjugial Angel stone
That here he stands with heavy head
The backward-looking pillared dead
Inert, moss-covered, aIl alone?
The Holy Ghost trawls ln the Void,
With fleshly Sophy on His Hook
The Sons of God crowd round to look
At plumpy limbs to be enjoyed
The Greater Man casts out the line
With dangling Sophy as the lure
Who howls around the Heavens' colure
To clasp the Human Form Divine
Rose-petals fall from fallen hair
That in the clay is redolent
Of liquid oozings and the scent
Of the dark Pit, the Beastly lair
And is my Love become the beast
That was, and is not, and yet is,
Who stretches scarlet holes to kiss
And clasps with claws the fleshly feast
Sweet Rosamund, adult'rous Rose
May lie inside her urn and stink
Whlle Alfred's tears tum into ink
And drop into her quelque-chose
The Angel spreads his golden wings
And raises high his golden cock
And man and wife together lock
Into one corpse that moans and sings”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from Angels and Insects
A.S. Byatt
Born place: in Sheffield, Yorkshire, The United Kingdom
Born date August 24, 1936
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“This, indeed, is the problem, the ultimate question, in neuroscience—and it cannot be answered, even in principle, without a global theory of brain function, one capable of showing the interactions of every level, from the micropatterns of individual neuronal responses to the grand macropatterns of an actual lived life. Such a theory, a neural theory of personal identity, has been proposed in the last few years by Gerald M. Edelman, in his theory of neuronal group selection, or “neural Darwinism.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
“Three days after a German submarine sank the Lusitania, Wilson addressed an audience of recently naturalized citizens in Philadelphia. "You cannot become thorough Americans", he told them, "if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups, A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American".
"We can have no 'fifty-fifty' allegiance in the country", Theodore Roosevelt said two years later. "Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all". He condemned Americans who saw the world from the standpoint of another nation. "We Americans are children of the crucible", T.R. said. "The crucible does not do its work unless it turns out those cast into it in one national mould".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
“يمكنك أن تصبح وحيدًا وتمضي قدمًا في حياتك غاضبًا على العالم أجمع ؛ يمكنك أن تسنشيط غضبًا إلى أن يأتي اليوم الذي تقتل فيه زملاءك . أو يمكنك إيجاد مخرجًا لحبك حيث سيُقدر حبك وتكون محبوبًا بالمقابل”
― Jodee Blanco, quote from Please Stop Laughing at Me... One Woman's Inspirational Story
“My dad had said don’t look, but I’d already seen him. Pickled eggs are the Devil’s snack.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“a woman whom the course of years had turned sour and to whom the vows meant poverty of spirit, chastity of humour, and obedience only to some rigorous concept of duty.”
― Donna Leon, quote from The Death of Faith
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Across the River and...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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