A. S. Byatt Quotes

Sometimes I feel I don't know even know how to run.

I'm so indecisive that I can't pick a favorite color, and I'm allergic to 12 things.

Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.

Nothing is inevitable in life. People make choices, and those choices have results, and we all live with the results.

He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.

There wasn't a time where I felt fearful that I couldn't make the best decisions possible.

Imagine the choices you'd make if you had no fear-of falling, of losing, of being alone, of disapproval.

Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

I feel that the world is in a really dangerous place and it scares me.

On the flip side, no one has any idea who the hell I am. I felt like I had to prove myself to them. On any new project I'm working on, the first week is nerve-wracking, but especially with these people that I admire so much and who I just want to be equal with.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

The biggest anxiety is just about America's role in the world. People are feeling very unsafe. They really are. They're just wondering whether, anything can be done to try to stabilize the world a little bit.

As a profession, freelance writing is notoriously insecure. That's the first argument in its favor. For many reasons, a few of them rational, the thought of knowing exactly what next year's accomplishments, routine, income, and vacation will be - or even what time I have to get up tomorrow morning - has always depressed me.

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.

You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Charlie Brown: "Life is just too much for me... I've been confused right from the day I was born... I think the whole trouble is that we're thrown into life too fast... We're not really prepared..." Linus: "What did you want... A chance to warm up first?"

Decisions are the endless uncertainties of life that we'll not know if they're right until the very end, so do the best you can and hope its right.

You've only got to walk into a pub or a café or anything and you'll find people talking about topics they're very unhappy with. You feel as though things are being eroded and people don't know where they belong anymore.

I think I know what is bothering the students. I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.

You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, "My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened." And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked.

The shadow of fear and uncertainty lies over most of us; for us the future seems far from being as clear and open as we believed it would be.

Zizi was young and often confused about how to live his life, �and when he made a choice he clung to it with fierce resolve, �as if to beat his uncertainty into submission.

A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It's as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there... is... no... key.