Quotes from Angela Carter

Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea--a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being continiously on the point of melting.

This clockwork twin of mine halted before me, her bowels churning out a settecento minuet, and offered me the bold carnation of her smile. Click, click--she raises her arm and busily dusts my cheeks with pink, powdered chalk that makes me cough; then thrusts towards me her little mirror.

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.

Nothing about him reminded me of humanity.

His tobacco had a richly herbal smell, as though it was good for you.

It was a sensitive and musical dog.

And this was how the red people passed their time and amused themselves when they thought nobody was watching.

He was ready for any funeral and he carried a cane tipped with a silver ball that looked as if it could kill. His diabolical elegance could not have existed without his terrible emaciation; he wore his dandyism in his very bones, as if it was a colour that had seeped out of his essential skeleton to dye his clothes, and he never made a single movement that was not a gaunt but riveting work of art.

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.

Because she is the channel of life, woman as mythic mother lives at one remove from life. A woman who defines herself through her fertility has no other option. So a woman who feels she has been deprived of motherhood is trebly deprived—of children; of the value of herself as mother; and of her own self, as autonomous being.

the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT -- exquisite prose though it might contain. ('BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS' would be more like it, I should hope.)

Dresses me again in an embrace as lucid and encopassing it might be made of water.

Sin and contraception aside, anal intercourse has an egalitarian lure for Sade. If sexual relations are implicitly political in Sade, the sexual act, among equals, is one of mutual if sequential dominance.

This world's a vile oubliette. Yet in its refuse I will find the key to free me.

They were dirty and common. She hated to use the word "common", only common people called other people "common"; her mother taught her that.

Sade's work, with its compulsive attraction for the delinquent imagination of the romantics, has been instrumental in shaping aspects of the modern sensibility; its paranoia, its despair, its sexual terrors, its omnivorous egocentricity, its tolerance of massacre, holocaust, annihilation.

Justine is a good woman in a man's world. She is a good woman according to the rules for women laid down by men and her reward is rape, humiliation and incessant beatings. Her life is that of a woman martyrised by the circumstances of her life as a woman.

Life's a carnival.

For Justine's conception of virtue is a specifically feminine one in that sexual abstinence plays a large part in it. In common speech, a 'bad boy' may be a thief, or a drunkard, or a liar, and not necessarily just a womaniser. But a 'bad girl' always contains the meaning of a sexually active girl and Justine knows she is good because she does not fuck.

When the sun goes down, it is very cold and then I easily start crying because the winter moon pierces my heart The Smile of Winter

The carnival's got to stop, some time.

My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

It was a real treat when he'd read me Daisy Miller out loud. But we'd reached the point in our relationship when, in a straight choice between him and Henry James, I'd have taken Henry James any day even if Henry James were dead and not much of a one for the girls when living, either.