Quotes from Angela Carter

There are some eyes that can eat you.

I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: "What is the most miraculous event in the world?" And I answer myself: "I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.

all white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched

ruin had been the original blueprint and men and women had lived here only in a necessary but intermediate stage of the execution of the grand design

She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right.

The victim is always morally superior to the master; that is the victim's ambivalent triumph. That is why there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men; our victim status ensures that we rarely have the opportunity.

She is obscene to the extent to which she is beautiful. Her beauty, her submissiveness and the false expectations that these qualities will do her some good are what make her obscene.

Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphic weather, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to venture out late, scuttling along by the churchyard wall with half a juicy torso slung across his back. The white light scours the fields and scours them again until everything gleams and he will leave paw-prints in the hoar-frost when he runs howling round the graves at night in his lupine fiestas.

This is some kind of heretical, possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Roscicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie!

The touch of her hand filled me with a wild loneliness.

The air shuddered with the beginning of absence.

The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they're likely to have amongst themselves too keep them all in order

But needs must when the devil drives.

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.

Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them...

She learns her lesson at once; to escape slavery, she must embrace tyranny.

To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion.

It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven't got a family of their own, they will invent one.

They look around the world and think: 'There must be something better!' But there isn't. Sorry, chum. This is it. What you see is what you get. Only the here and now.

People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed.

Indeed, pornography is basically propaganda for fucking, an activity, one would have thought, that did not need much advertising in itself, because most people want to do it as soon as they know how.

Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real.

He grudgingly admitted what she had already guessed, that he disliked the presence of servants because, she thought, a constant human presence would remind him too bitterly of his otherness [...]

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.