From the renowned author of Possession, The Children’s Book is the absorbing story of the close of what has been called the Edwardian summer: the deceptively languid, blissful period that ended with the cataclysmic destruction of World War I. In this compelling novel, A.S. Byatt summons up a... read more
“"Do not let me disturb you, dear Mrs. Wellwood. No one knows better than myself the horror--the vein freezing unpleasantness--of having the flow of writing disrupted."”Herbert Methley
“"I don't think the real tales do frighten you. I think you accept the rules. They work in a fenced world which isn't the real world, where nothing really changes. Witches get punished, and goose-girls become princesses, and what was lost is restored."”Griselda Wellwood
“Florence began to weep. Gabriel stroked her hair. The child inside stretched its frog-fingers and its stick legs, and put a fine thumb into its unfinished ghost-mouth, and sucked.”
“They were all equally present because they were all gone.”
The seen and the unseen world were interlocked and superimposed. You could trip out of one and into the other at any moment.Highlighted by 40 Kindle customers
An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth, composite whole.Highlighted by 31 Kindle customers
Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past.Highlighted by 28 Kindle customers
Readers ought not to meet writers, he thought. They are meant not to.Highlighted by 28 Kindle customers
You did not so much mind being—conventionally—betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.Highlighted by 26 Kindle customers
“Grown-ups always think we don’t know things they must have known themselves. They need to remember wrong, I think.”Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers
He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn’t give up their wrath, even if they needed to.Highlighted by 23 Kindle customers
What angered her was the lie. Those who are lied to feel diminished, set aside, misused.Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers
And yet—like Griselda, she did want to think. And she did see her future as, perhaps, the choice between thinking and sex.Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
kobold figures, one in particular with long draggling hair and a mournful gaze. Tom thought immediately that his mother would need to see it. He tried, and failed, to memorise the shapes. Julian explained. It had an interesting history, he said. No one knew exactly what it was made of. It was some kind of gilt alloy. It was probable that it had been made in Canterbury—modelled in wax and cast—but apart from the symbols of the evangelists on theHighlighted by 10 Kindle customers
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