Quotes from Angela Carter

It doesn't matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.

You must not think my father valued me at less than a king's ransom; but, at no more than a king's ransom.

Excretion is his first concrete production and, through it, the child gains his first experience of labour relations. He may reserve the right to go on excremental strike or to engage in a form of faecal offensive. The excremental faculty is a manipulative device and to be baulked of the free control of it is to be deprived of the first, most elementary, expression of autonomy.

Watching a film was like being a voyeur, living vicariously.

Erl-King lives

You never saw such a wild thing as my mother.

He knew it was too late to turn back and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies.

Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time.

The world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world - the real world, if you like - is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structures is just as malleable.

he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.

Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation and reverted to chaos, existing only to themselves in an unstructured world where they were not formally acknowledged, becoming an ever-widening margin of undifferentiated and nameless matter surrounding the outposts of man, who no longer made himself familiar with these things or rendered the authentic in his experience by the gift of naming.

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

ESCAPING SLOWLY

By the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good.

You're nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights.

Her carved eyeballs stared back at them with the uncanny blindness of statues, who seem always to be perceiving another dimension, where everything is statues.

behind every great man is a woman dedicated to his greatness whilst behind every great woman is a man dedicated to bringing her down.

I loved it and have always loved it best of all, the moment when the lights go down, the curtain glows, you know that something wonderful is going to happen. It doesn't matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure. To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as Uncle Perry used to say. I always preferred foreplay too.

There are limits to the power of laughter and though I may hint at them from time to time, I do not propose to step over them.

Then I understood the thing I'd never grasped back in those days, when I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I'd wanted to be ephemeral, I'd wanted the moment, to live in just the glorious moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you.

DUPÄ' UNA DINTRE URECHI ÈšINEA O ÈšIGARÄ' RULATÄ' DE MÂNÄ', FUMATÄ' PE JUMÄ'TATE ?I APOI STINSÄ' DIN CARE SE SCURGEAU FRÂNTURI DE HÂRTIE ?I TUTUN.

Old wives' tales — that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.

I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly