You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere. - A.S. Byatt
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself... - A.S. Byatt
As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him. - A.S. Byatt
[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt. - A.S. Byatt
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, like roots and other blind things moving in the grave. - A.S. Byatt
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by. - A.S. Byatt