Quotes from Angela Carter

Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like a scimitar he held. The picture had a caption 'Reproof of curiosity.

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.

Though I still turn up my coat-collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally isn't it? Everything else is artful.

Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave him the kiss she owed him. What big teeth you have! She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest's Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even as he answered: All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat.

I am the lady of the castle. My name is exile. My name is anguish. My name is longing. Far from the world on the windy crests of the mountain, I am kept in absolute seclusion, my time passes in an endless reverie, a perpetual swooning. I am both the Sleeping Beauty and the enchanted castle; the princess drowses in the castle of her flesh.

She had given herself to the world in her entirety and then found nothing was left

And could love free me from the shadows? Can a caged bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?)

The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place." - Angela Carter (1940-1992)

There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the world from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.

I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking.

Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.

Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning.

The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it!

Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?

She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: WHEN YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT.

I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must know I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.

Wherein does a woman's honour reside, old chap? In her vagina or in her spirit?

Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!

I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.

Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty looks, pet. Come here. She did not move. He ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed. Come here, he said again, softly. So she went.

How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.

Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.