Possession Byatt Quotes & Sayings

I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat? — Fritz Leiber

He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings. — A.S. Byatt

You cannot stop things. You can only be prepared for them to happen. — Erin Morgenstern

Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle.
"I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-"
"Beautiful."
"Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening"
"It needn't."
"Even you - drew back - when we met. I expect that now. I use it."
"Yes. But you don't want - do you - to be alone always. Or do you?"
"I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on ;doing my work;. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand? — A.S. Byatt

In our democracy every young person should have an equal opportunity to obtain a higher education, regardless of his station in life or financial means. — John F. Kennedy

All anyone really wants is to feel appreciated. So if you want to create real, long-lasting relationships, do that. — Charles F. Glassman

I love Steven Wright. — Demetri Martin

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

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender it - this was the wise saying of Sir Thomas Browne. — A.S. Byatt

Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed beside him on his travels, leather-brown and skeletal, crowned with lace and gold circlet, hung about with chains of diamonds and pearls, her bone-fingers fantastically ringed. — A.S. Byatt

He had a thwarting day. The heath and moor were crisscrossed with little tracks, dusty and twisting between the heather and bracken and the little juniper trees with their clinging roots. There was not one way but many, all athwart each other like the cracks on a crazy jug, and he followed first one and then the other, choosing the straightest and stoniest and finding himself always under the hot-sun at another crossing just like the one he had just left. After a time he decided to got with the sun behind him always
at least this led to consistency of proceeding
though it must be told that when he decided this he had only the haziest idea, dear readers, of where the sun had been at the beginning of the venture. So it often is in this life. We become consistent and orderly too late, on insufficient grounds, and perhaps in the wrong direction.
Possession — A.S. Byatt

He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination's work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in sleep, or would fight for. — A.S. Byatt

Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. — A.S. Byatt

At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy. — Ian McEwan

His forty-third year. His small time's end. His time-
Who saw Infinity through the countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it. — A.S. Byatt

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

The most dazzling aspect of 'Possession' is Ms. Byatt's canny invention of letters, poems and diaries from the 19th century. — Jay Parini

There's no one there to understand, there's just understanding, which flourishes in you as peace, joy and contentment. — Mooji

A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because 'Possession' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight. — Jay Parini