"Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of..."
- A.S. Byatt
"A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art."
"Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic..."
"My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage."
"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 do..."
"You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute par..."
"Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying."
"Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by."
"Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink."
"it [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, and the transformations and transmutations of grief, like rot in the earth-mould..."