"For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth"."
- 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."
"Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appe..."
"You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere."
"Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold,..."
"Outside our small safe place flies mystery."
"…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her foo..."
"History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself..."
"Good writing is always new."
"Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977]."