"Woman! woman! What a disturbing element you are in the universe - man's universe!"

“Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.”

“I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.”

“All I could do is lie there and think about how much her voice changed when she asked me if she was pretty, and how much she changed when I answered.”

“I do not think it pleases the Lord when we worry because we think we never do enough or that what we do is never good enough.”

“The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer, but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

Source : "The Bird: Its Form and Function". Book by William Beebe, 1906.

“I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.”

Source : "AS Byatt: woman of letters and ...science!". "All In The Mind" with Antonia Byatt, www.abc.net.au. August 21, 2010.

“I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error.”

“Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.”