R.I.P. A.S. Byatt

Possession remains one of my favorite books, a perfect combination of scholarship, satire, love, and hope. A few lines:

This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.

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

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.

We must come to grief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities.

I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.