Byatt Quotes

She looked, quickly, quickly, it was better than before, thanked him and averted her eyes. She came to trust him with her disintegration. ~ A.S. Byatt

They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures - ~ A.S. Byatt

I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?"
"No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to. ~ 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

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

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules. ~ 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

How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence. ~ A.S. Byatt

There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value of listening to advice, and of doing things properly. And this filled the perverse daughter with a great desire to go even a little way into the wild wood, where there were no plates and no stitching, but might well be a need of such things as she knew she had it in herself to perform ... ~ A.S. Byatt

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, 'That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously. ~ A.S. Byatt

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred. ~ A.S. Byatt

You are safe with me."
"I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere. ~ 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

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977]. ~ A.S. Byatt

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink. ~ A.S. Byatt

But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie. ~ A.S. Byatt

Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settled at a different distance, an object of interest, not of choking confinement. He reread his letters. The world opened. [ ... ] How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence. Nothing in what he had written had changed and everything had changed. ~ A.S. Byatt

You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world. ~ A.S. Byatt

Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes?It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist. ~ A.S. Byatt

Iron bars make a cage all right, and the more you look at them or reproduce them the more you know it's a real cage. ~ A.S. Byatt

A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love indifference and dislike, also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forbears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else, too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come. ~ A.S. Byatt

There are many ways of writing badly about painting ... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words ... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements ... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing ... ~ A.S. Byatt

Did we not - did you not flame, and I catch fire? ~ A.S. Byatt

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 representation. ~ A.S. Byatt

I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up. ~ A.S. Byatt

The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ... ~ A.S. Byatt

He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not. ~ A.S. Byatt

In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain. ~ A.S. Byatt

I would not for the whole world diminish you. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest - "I love you for yourself alone" - "I love you essentially" - and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by "you essentially" - lips hands and eyes. But you must know - we do know - that it is not so - dearest, I love your soul and with that your poetry - the grammar and stopping and hurrying syntax of your quick thought - quite as much essentially you as Cleopatra's hopping was essentially hers to delight Antony - more essentially, in that while all lips hands and eyes resemble each other somewhat (though yours are enchanting and also magnetic) - your thought clothed with your words is uniquely you, came with you, would vanish if you vanished - ~ A.S. Byatt

Usually, it was an accident. A lie I never set out to tell. A trick I never meant to play. I'd open my mouth, and something strange would come out, new and not mine. Like there was someone else inside. ~ Rory Power

-in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking. ~ A.S. Byatt

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is. ~ A.S. Byatt

Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure. ~ A.S. Byatt

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me. ~ A.S. Byatt

There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy skull on skull, through soft skin and softer flesh. He thought: skulls separate people. In this one sense, I could say, they would say, I lose myself in her. But in that bone box, she thinks and thinks, as I think in mine, things the other won't hear, can't hear, though we go on like this for sixty years. What does she think I am? He had no idea. He had no idea what she was. ~ A.S. Byatt

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh ... he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste. ~ A.S. Byatt

The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them. ~ A.S. Byatt

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 fire, like points of stars in the dark - readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge. ~ A.S. Byatt

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs. ~ A.S. Byatt

There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers. ~ A.S. Byatt

All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable. ~ 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. ~ A.S. Byatt

There are things I take sides about, like capital punishment, which it seems to me there is only one side about: it is evil. But there are two or three sides to sexual harassment, and the moment you get into particular cases, there is injustice in every conceivable direction. It's a mess. ~ A.S. Byatt

Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness."
Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested.
I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn't the point. We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and we're so imprisoned in ourselves - we can't see things. ~ A.S. Byatt

I think we've had rather too much dirt rather than not enough. That's not a prudish English remark, but a statement of saturation. These up-and-coming young men," she splutters. "Penelope Fitzgerald
they think, 'Ah! Middle-aged lady with frizzy hair and a nice smile; she must be writing tastefully.' I say she's writing against taste, quite savagely. But they don't pick it up because they're brash young men poncing about, waving their blood and thunder and condoms! ~ A.S. Byatt

I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors. ~ A.S. Byatt

Lists are a form of power. ~ A.S. Byatt

All old stories, my cousin, will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which must be there - in this case the angry Ocean, the terrible leap of the horse, the fall of Dahud from the crupper, the engulfment etc etc. And yet to add something of yours, of the writer, which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated for private or personal ends. ~ A.S. Byatt

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended. ~ A.S. Byatt

In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist. ~ A.S. Byatt

Reese is trying, but she can't get it quite right, because nobody's Byatt but Byatt, not even the girl in these memories. There's this place in her, somewhere nobody can touch, not me or Reese or anyone. It's just hers, and I don't even know what it is, really, just that it's there, and that she takes it with her when she goes. ~ Rory Power

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated. ~ A.S. Byatt

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically. ~ A.S. Byatt

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.) ~ A.S. Byatt

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me. ~ A.S. Byatt

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation. ~ A.S. Byatt

The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic. ~ A.S. Byatt

One of you needs food,' said the Old Woman, 'and three of you need healing.'
So the Princess sat down to good soup, and fresh bread, and fruit tart with clotted cream and a mug of sharp cider, and the Old Woman put the creatures on the table, and healed them in her way. Her way was to make them tell the story of their hurts, and as they told, she applied ointments and drops with tiny feathery brushes and little bone pins ... ~ A.S. Byatt

It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts. ~ A.S. Byatt

You will not be here
I shall not be here
much longer.'
'Let us not think of time.'
'We have reached Faust's non-plus. We say to every moment "Verweile doch, du bist so schön," and if we are not immediately damned, the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. But it is open to us to regret each minute as it passes.'
'We shall be exhausted.'
'And is not that a good state to end in? ~ A.S. Byatt

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that. ~ A.S. Byatt

She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had thought, when she started thinking, about her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence.But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, she saw that there were reciprocities, both physical and figurative. ~ A.S. Byatt

I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism. ~ A.S. Byatt

I'm still bitter," I say. "Nobody ever gave me anything for my first." Byatt laughs, her hands moving quick to open the soup can, and she gives me the lid. "There. My gift to you. ~ Rory Power

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

We are a Faustian generation, my dear
we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know. ~ A.S. Byatt

We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness. ~ A.S. Byatt

Failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements ... Any one of the old four - earth, air, fire, water - can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter - months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln. ~ A.S. Byatt

... 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 food and drink too
and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew ... . ~ A.S. Byatt

In the morning the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction, and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful. ~ A.S. Byatt

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges. ~ A.S. Byatt

We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness. ~ A.S. Byatt

I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But now I think -- it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet? ~ A.S. Byatt

Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies. ~ A.S. Byatt

It was hard for a man and a woman to be fiends with no under thought or glimpsed prospect of sex. They wanted to be friends. It was almost a matter of principle. She was as intelligent as any Fellow of King's - though he thought she did not know it - he was in love with her mind as it followed clues through labyrinths. Love is, among many other things, a response to energy, and Griselda's mind was precise and energetic. He wanted to make love to her too. ~ A.S. Byatt

If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful. ~ A.S. Byatt

To a dusty shelf we aspire. ~ A.S. Byatt

I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of being in love, which they regard as most particular, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, item, one graceful attitude of body or mind, item, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say, 1821-1844
I have always believed this in love to be something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you
no, I do tell you
friendship is rarer, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love. ~ A.S. Byatt

She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds. ~ A.S. Byatt

The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains ... The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless. ~ A.S. Byatt

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not. ~ A.S. Byatt

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 his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good. ~ A.S. Byatt

You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that."
"What I can't see - what I really can't see - is why everyone doesn't ask themselves that, all the time . How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see - and get told what the Bible says about the poor - and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats - and eating huge beefsteaks - I can't see it."
"I have brought a book for you to read. I think probably you should not let it be seen in your home. But I think it will speak to you. ~ A.S. Byatt

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm. ~ A.S. Byatt

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful. ~ A.S. Byatt

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has. ~ A.S. Byatt

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors. ~ A.S. Byatt

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends. ~ 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

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it. ~ 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

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 particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of ;unsatisfied love; - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to ;being in love;,when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel - or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I could diagnose this state of ;being in love; which they regard as ;most particular;, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, ;item;, one graceful attitude of body or mind, ;item;, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say 1821-1844 – I have always believed this ;in love; to be of something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet who assumes and informs both. ~ A.S. Byatt

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words. ~ A.S. Byatt

The world of magic is double, natural, and supernatural. Magic is impossible in a purely materialist world, a purely sceptical world, a world of pure reason. Magic depends on, it makes use of, the body, the body of desire, the libido, or life-force which Sigmund Freud said stirred the primitive cells as the sun heated the stony surface of the earth-cells which, according to him, always had the lazy, deep desire to give up striving, to return to the quiescent state from which they were roused.
-The Biographer's Tale ~ A.S. Byatt

Val was eating cornflakes. She ate very little else, at home. They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool. ~ A.S. Byatt

He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster. ~ A.S. Byatt

Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott ... who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web - to ply an industrious shuttle - to make - something - to close the Shutters and the Peephole too - ~ A.S. Byatt

Maud considered. She said, 'In every age, there must be truths people can't fight - whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose - to imagine - he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely - but not in the large plan - ~ A.S. Byatt

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, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. ~ A.S. Byatt

Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept. ~ A.S. Byatt