Angela Carter citations

“I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”

“I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.”

“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”

“The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”

“The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.”

“Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.”

“I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.”

“I desire therefore I exist.”

“The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.”

“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”

“I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.”

“Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been”

“Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.”

“There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.”

“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”

“We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.”

“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”

“Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

“His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”

“They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, gray members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long wavering howl… an aria of fear made audible.
The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.”

“Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.”

“It is far easier for a woman to lead
a blameless life than it is for a man;
all she has to do is to avoid
sexual intercourse like the plague.”

“The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.”

“Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.”

“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

“One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.”

“Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge… The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.”

“They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.”