Quotes from The Children's Book

“She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world. ”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“...failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements... Any one of the old four - earth, air, fire, water - can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter - months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“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, quote from The Children's Book

“There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare’s rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“It was hard for a man and a woman to be fiends with no under thought or glimpsed prospect of sex. They wanted to be friends. It was almost a matter of principle. She was as intelligent as any Fellow of King's - though he thought she did not know it - he was in love with her mind as it followed clues through labyrinths. Love is, among many other things, a response to energy, and Griselda's mind was precise and energetic. He wanted to make love to her too.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and faked. He was afraid of being isolated and solitary, which he feared was his fate. He was certainly not himself an object of desire to other boys, as far as he knew—and he was knowing.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn’t she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her parents, her acting parents, in case the love turned out to be disproportionate, unreturned, the parent not-a-parent.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“He began to walk into the pottery, which had been the dairy. He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn’t give up their wrath, even if they needed to.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn't easy for them being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then there's the problem of being different sexes. I think if they are good friends, then whatever else they are - or are not - is better.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immediately. He woke and slept, woke and slept, time after time before dawn, each time taking possession again of the dark and the silence.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Pomona’s Tom’s age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name—so dangerous, don’t you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go neither forwards nor back.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters’ education as seriously as his sons’. Humphry said that Dorothy—and Griselda—were still only little girls. Hardly, said Skinner, smiling at the two serious young faces. Hardly. They would be young women any moment, he could see. His look made Dorothy feel unexpectedly heated, on her skin, and also inside her. She wriggled a little and sat straighter. Griselda said she didn’t think her parents saw any need for her to be educated. Skinner said, it should be enough that she wanted to be educated.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that.”
“What I can’t see—what I really can’t see—is why everyone doesn’t ask themselves that, all the time . How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see—and get told what the Bible says about the poor—and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats—and eating huge beefsteaks—I can’t see it.”
“I have brought a book for you to read. I think probably you should not let it be seen in your home. But I think it will speak to you.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?”
“No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick film, a coloured oilcloth, spread over a cauldron of vapours which shaped and reshaped themselves into shadowy forms, embracing, threatening, glaring.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don’t come into it, much, for me. I do what I must.” Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn’t.
“I imagine you don’t talk to many of us, as against studying us in bulk. The dangerous masses. To be put in camps, and set to work on projects.”
“You are being unfair,” said Charles/Karl. “You are mocking me.”
“We can do that, at least, if we dare.”
“Miss Warren,” said Charles/Karl, “I wish you would not talk as though you were a group, or a class, or a committee. I should like to be talking to you as a person.”
“Can you?”
“Why should I not?”
“For every reason. I am both working-class and not respectable. I am a Fallen Woman. I have a daughter. You don’t want to be talking to me as if I were a person, Mr. Wellwood.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They were a stationary form of violent movement.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

“God,” said Benedict Fludd, “your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible—laughable, laughable—and the next, he is imperious.” He stopped. He said “It is like the phases of the moon, maybe. Or the seasons of the sphere we live on, rolling in and out of the light, skeleton trees one day, and then snow, and afterwards the bright green veil and after that the full heat and shining. Only it is neither regular nor predictable. And there are—others—who stride in, when he takes himself off. Who seem persuasive. Like Hindoo demons who are gods in their own terms.”
― A.S. Byatt, quote from The Children's Book

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