Quotes from Angela Carter

Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.

A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.

Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.

Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.

Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.

The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat.

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?

I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I...I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?

She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...

One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.

I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.

He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.

And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.

The questions that I ask myself, I think they're very much to do with reality. I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I...I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.