Quotes from Angela Carter

You do not deserve this' he said. 'Who can say what I deserve or no?' I said. 'I've done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me

I was so unaccustomed to nakedness. I was so unused to my own skin that to take off all my clothes involved a kind of flaying.

The tiger sat still as a heraldic beast, in the pact he had made with his ferocity to do me no harm. He was far larger than I could have imagined, from the poor, shabby things I'd seen once, in the Czar's menagerie at Petersburg, the golden fruit of their eyes dimming, withering in the far North of captivity. Nothing about him reminded me of humanity.

Buzz crouched between her feet and scrutinised as much as he could see of her perilous interior to find out if all was in order and there were no concealed fangs or guillotines inside her to ruin him.

She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey

Lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero

Her hair falls down like tears

The long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition.

He had become the sign of an idea of a hero; and she herself had been forced to impersonate the sign of a memory of a bride.

In a state of mental tumult, conflict and disorientation, he wanders the freezing city night, now gazing at the ice thickening on the dark waters of the Neva, now peering at the great horseman on his plinth with a vague terror, as though the horseman were not the effigy of the city's founder but the herald of four yet more mythic horsemen who are, indeed, on their way to confound Petersburg forever, though they won't arrive yet, not quite yet.

My spite was sharp as broken glass

Una jovencita entra en el bosque tan confiadamente como Caperucita Roja de camino a la casa de su abuela, pero esta luz no admite ambigüedades y, una vez aquí, se quedará atrapada en su propia ilusión, porque todo en el bosque es exactamente lo que parece

He strips me of my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlized satin, like a skinned rabbit; then dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and encompassing it might be made of water. And shakes over me dead leaves as if into the stream I have become.

Every morning, after prayers, the pirate leader removed his black loincloth which was his only garb and bent over the poop in front of the altar while each of his men filed past him in devout silence, kissed his exposed arse and emitted a sharp bark of adulation while slapping his buttocks briefly with the flat of their blades.

Tus ojos verdes son una cámara de reducción. Si los miro lo suficiente, me volveré pequeña como mi propio reflejo, me convertiré en un punto y, después, me desvaneceré.

Look hot, stay cool, we'd instructed one another; we'd got the stance to match the suits off pat, you stuck your hipbone forward, let your shoulders droop, put all your weight on the one leg.

But there wasn't the merest whiff about of the kind of magic that comes when the theatre darkens, the bottom of the curtain glows, the punters settle down, you take a deep breath... none of the person-to-person magic we put together with spit and glue and willpower.

She took to children like a duck to water, enough to make you wonder why she'd not had any of her own. I asked her about that, once, years later; she said she'd never, not until she picked us up and cuddled us that very first morning, known what men were FOR. 'I'd often wondered,' she said. 'When I saw you two, the penny dropped.

The grandfather clock was all right until Grandma fixed it. All she did was tap it and the weights dropped off. She always had that effect on gentlemen.

NU S-AR FI A?TEPTAT CA SUFLETUL LUI SÄ' CUNOASCÄ' ASTFEL DE TRÄ'IRI. […] MELANIE SE SIMÈšEA U?OR VINOVATÄ' CÄ' NU-I PUTEA ÎMPÄ'RT??I SENTIMENTELE CU ACEEA?I INTENSITATE.

His Raskolnikov eyes, like dead coals, were altogether of too fine cast – speaking too much blighted and heroic romanticism – for a poor shivering wretch such as himself.

Now all shun the village below the chateau in which the beautiful queen of the vampires helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes.

The waxen fingers of the Countess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called L'Amoureux. Never, never before… never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving L'Amoureux. She shakes, she trembles, her great eyes close beneath her finely veined, nervously throbbing eyelids; the lovely cartomancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love and death.

Pornography, like marriage and the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of false universalising. Its excesses belong to that timeless, locationless area outside history, outside geography, where fascist art is born. Nevertheless, there is no question of an aesthetics of pornography. It can never be art for art's sake. Honourably enough, it is always art with work to do.