Quotes from Angela Carter

Repression is Justine's whole being - repression of sex, of anger and of her own violence; the repressions demanded of Christian virtue, in fact.

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force.

eldritch ways

The triumph of the will recreates, as its Utopia, the world of early childhood, and that is a world of nightmare, impotence and fear, in which the child fantasises, out of its own powerlessness, an absolute supremacy.

There had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils.

The more I saw of love, the less I liked the look of it

These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye...

It's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves.

Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology.

But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine's suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there is none, it turns out, in her virtue itself; it does nobody any good, least of all herself.

The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.

From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.

And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, orange of tiger-lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from a florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream.

Fevvers felt that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations n order to be a woman. She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea.

The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason.

The rich can afford to be virtuous, the poor must shift as best they can.

Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable." And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: "THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS.

Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.

Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality.

Finn is Daddy,' said Victoria with fat satisfaction. 'Not yet,' said Finn. 'But we'll christen the first one Proximity.' Melanie choked on a mouthful.

And the light, I must apologise for the lack of light... a hereditary affliction of the eyes…

Do you not feel... that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

Necessary connections are fabulous beasts.