A. S. Byatt Quotes

Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration.

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

This was what happened after you'd been together with someone a long time. You loved that it was old and worn and comfy, but sometimes it was old and worn and comfy.

My primary relationship is with myself- all others are mirrors of it. As I learn to love myself, I automatically receive the love and appreciation that I desire from others. If I am commited to myself and to living my truth, I will attract others with equal commitment. My willingness to be intimate with my own deep feelings creates the space for intimacy with another.

That's how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can't experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.

Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked.

My wife is my closest friend. Sure, I'm attracted to her in every way possible, but that's not the answer. Because I've been attracted to other people, and I couldn't stand 'em after a while.

What is a friend? I will tell you . . . . it is someone with whom you dare to be yourself.

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.

Do you love me, do you wanna be my friend?

It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.

We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.

If you want to know me, look inside your heart.

At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, it's usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them. The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.

I think I quite desperately wanted to have that kind of special companionship [like marriage ] . . . a special relationship, yet I hid from it for many, many years and pretended to be cynical about it.

I want to be wherever you are.

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.

They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to

When you look back... on your love affairs... what you really find out is that the only person you really go to bed with is yourself.

I know you even under the skin.

You're all I care about," I said. "No. And me. The person I am when I'm with you, the way I see myself and know myself. That person who lives only when I'm with you.