Antonia S. Byatt

Roman

Besessen

ausra

An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

Were you happy I came? Were we godlike as you promised? Two earnest pacers, pointing diligent toes in the dust.

We pass the time of day - and the Time of the Universe has a brief stop at our fingers' touch.

"This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run"

No mere human can stand in a fre and not be consumed.

No writer has written well enough of the Bliss of sleep. Coleridge wrote of the pains of sleep, and Macbeth speaks of a sleep foregone - but not of the bliss of relaxing one's grip of the world and warmly and motionlessly moving into another. Folded in by curtains, closed in by the warmth of blankets, without weight, it seems-

Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. 

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

sariya

"That was no problem nowadays, books travelled the aether like light."

"'The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modified it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence."

"The clock ticked, motes of dust danced in sunlight, Roland meditated on the tiresome and bewitching endlessness of the quest for knowledge."

Besessen quotes

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