'You don't care now, do you? Not really care?
You must write your quota of pages tonight and the rest of us must shift as we can. 
Well, we'll shift. I'd respect you more - oh yes, and envy you less - if you did care.'

'I care,' said Henry.

'You don't know what it means,' said Oliver briskly, turning his hands meditatively before the flames.
He said, 'People like me have very complicated feelings about people like you.
I'm aware that you don't really care whether I tell you about them or not - 
you'd probably rather I didn't. 
But I seem to share what's apparently a common urge to explain everything to you - to drop all my little worries and stoppages into the well of your considered silence. 
Perhaps because one feels that since the worries don't worry you,
and the stoppages don't stop you, you've got time to make something of them, 
whilst one gets on with the struggling.
Which I resent; but still, I talk.'

The Shadow of the Sun ~ A.S.Byatt

He had a vision of himself in his study, a dedicated and misguided Casaubon, and saw the precession of lives that he told himself his touch had withered - Caroline whom he had allowed to think that teacups - for him - were enough; Marget, whom he had thought arrogantly to solve by re-arranging on paper; Anna, who had gone pale in his shadow, and poked blindly about in no direction, a plant in a cellar.

The Shadow of the Sun ~ A.S.Byatt

Part of the trouble was that he was so upset that he had quite forgotten what he had been writing, and could not have summoned life or concentration enough to plan another paragraph; he saw his work now as he occasionally saw a novel the moment he had finished it - a grotesque parody of life, a string of words, selecting and obscuring facts to suit himself. And dead, dead, dead.

The Shadow of the Sun ~ A.S.Byatt

"No, of course you don't. You can't. I out to have seen that at first. You can't even begin to listen. What do you want to do?"

"I don't know." She hesitated, and then went on, driven. "But I don't want nothing. I want something, I want it badly. But I don't know what it is."

Oliver and Anna, The Shadow of the Sun ~ A.S.Byatt

Her view of love was still through the small end of the telescope; to be beautiful, it must be hopeless; if it looked, as Michael had, as though it might have been anything else, she took care to complicate it until it was safely impossible and remote again.

The Shadow of the Sun ~ A.S.Byatt

If I went away and lived my own life, she thought, I might manage to be everything I am, or have to be - and then I might see and not only remember having seen.

The Shadow of the Sun ~ A.S.Byatt

It had been an essential part of her picture that Michael should have been carefree, self-assured, even slightly cruel; he was easiest to admire like that. She did not quite know what to do with his anxiety; it was encouraging, but it diminished him in some way.

The Shadow of the Sun ~ A.S.Byatt

"She's in love."

"Happily?"

"Naturally not."

Henry and Oliver about Anna, The Shadow of the Sun ~ A.S.Byatt