Angela Carter

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

...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.

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

My father lost me to the Beast at cards

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the truth?'She nodded.'The firing squad.''That's not the whole truth. Try again.''Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness.'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.'He was silent for several minutes.'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.''Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?

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.

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written _ heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.

Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!

...as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.

She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.

Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season.

Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit._ Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?_ She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.

She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.

Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology.

The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.