When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.
Angela CarterI see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.
Angela CarterI will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.
Angela CarterMother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
Angela CarterSome cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with
Angela CarterIt shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.
Angela CarterHis contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanesecence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intagible relfections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.
Angela Carter