Quotes from Angela Carter

I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.

But one story in this book, 'How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales', shows just how much fairy stories could change a woman's desires, and how much a man might fear that change, would go to any lenghts to keep her from pleasure, as if pleasure itself threatened his authority. Which, of course, it did. It still does.

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

Sometimes he lays his head on my lap and lets me comb his lovely hair for him; his combings are leaves of every tree in the wood and dryly susurrate around my feet.

I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.

The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.

She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her queen and she hit me." Though, he recalled, not sufficiently brutally to require that he tie her wrists together with his belt, force her to kneel and beat her until she toppled over sideways. She raised a strangely joyous face to him; the pallor of her skin and the almost miraculous lustre of her eyes startled and even awed him.

She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.

I understand,' said Melanie. An ancient, female look passed between them; they were poor women pensioners, planets round a male sun.

Man does and is dressed to do so, his skin is his own business. He is artful, the creation of culture. Woman is; and is, therefore, fully dressed in no clothes at all, her skin is common property.

For now my skin was my sole capital in the world and today I'd make my first investment.

The notion of a natural propensity for vice is essential to Sadeian psychology; vice is innate, as is virtue, if social conditions are unalterable. This straitjacket psychology relates his fiction directly back to the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable; it is in conflict with his frequently expounded general theory of moral relativity, that good and evil are not the same thing at all times and in all places.

Ironing's nice and simple,' he said. 'I get all tangled up in words when I'm putting together those interminable papers....

The heart's egoism sees itself suffering when it sees another suffering and so it learns sympathy, because it can put itself into another's place; then the heart comes a little way out of its egoism and tentatively encounters the world. But, before the prospect of its own suffering, the heart melts completely and retreats into egoism, again, to protect itself.

A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.

It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.

a great future behind him, already

she found it made things easier if she dramatised them. Or melodramatised them. It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip if she saw him as a character in a film, possibly played by Orson Welles.

Sade's manicheistic dualism sees the world as irredeemably evil; vice must always prosper, virtue always despair. There is no hope for us as we are now.[...]Sade's vision is utterly without transcendence.

It was the beginning of an anxiety that would never end, except with the deaths of either or both; and anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but it is not compatible with innocence.

One of Sade's singularities is that he offers an absolutely sexualised view of the world, a sexualisation that permeates everything, much as his atheism does and, since he is not a religious man but a political man, he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality.

you see everything as though your eyes are going to lapse into tears.

So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious and resourceful as: Puss-in-Boots!

If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us - mounts and riders, both - could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars thumble out.