Quotes About Angela Carter

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

ordered me a sky from a florist

This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.

See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.

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.

The enchantment of that bright, sad, pretty place enveloped her and she found that, against all her expectations, she was happy there.

He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance.

It was the fault of the wedding-dress night, when she married the shadows and the world ended.

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

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.

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.

Finn is Daddy,' said Victoria with fat satisfaction. 'Not yet,' said Finn. 'But we'll christen the first one Proximity.' Melanie choked on a mouthful.

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

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.

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.

It was a sensitive and musical dog.

When the sun goes down, it is very cold and then I easily start crying because the winter moon pierces my heart The Smile of Winter

The excremental enthusiasm of the libertines transforms the ordure in which they roll to a bed of roses.

I had always held a little towards Gulliver's opinion, that horses are better than we are, and, that day, I would have been glad to depart with him to the kingdom of horses, if I'd been given the chance.

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.

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.