"She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn ..."
- A.S. Byatt
"Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other."
"They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously," he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths.As it creaked up, Blackadder said..."
"I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write."
"All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous."
"Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many women ..."
"She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her."
"But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world..."
"It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark."
"The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be e..."