Angela Carter citations

Page 2

“The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?”

“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.”

“He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.”

“Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.”

“She stood lost in eternity… watching the immense sky…”

“For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.”

“I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.”

“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”

“Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.”

“My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis.”

“Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it.”

“Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.”