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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.

-Angela Carter

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He Was Prepared To

Angela Carter

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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.

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A Book Is Simply The Container Of An Idea-like A Bottle; What Is Inside The Book Is What Matters.

Stars On Our Door, Stars In Our Eyes, Stars Exploding In The Bits Of Our Brains Where The Common Sense Should Have Been

So I Suppose I Do Not Know How He Really Looked, And, In Fact, I Suppose I Shall Never Know, Now, For He Was Plainly An Object Created In The Mode Of Fantasy. His Image Was Already Present Somewhere In My Head And I Was Seeking To Discover It In Actuality, Looking At Every Face I Met In Case It Was The Right Face - That Is, The Face Which Corresponded To My Notion Of The Unseen Face Of The One I Should Love, A Face Created Parthenogeneticallyby The Rage To Love Which Consumed Me.

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

She Said To The Daisy Girl With Her Big Brown Eyes: 'i Will Not Have It Plain. No. Fancy. It Must Be Fancy!' She Meant Her Future. A Moon-daisy Dropped To The Floor, Down From Her Hair, Like A Faintly Derisive Sign From Heaven.

And, Conversely, She Went On To Herself, Sneering At The Grand Duke's Palace, Poverty Is Wasted On The Poor, Who Never Know How To Make The Best Of Things, Are Only The Rich Without Money, Are Just As Useless At Looking After Themselves, Can't Handle Their Cash Just Like The Rich Can't, Always Squandering It On Bright, Pretty, Useless Things In Just The Same Way.

The End Of Exile Is The End Of Being.

The One-eyed Man Will Be King In The Country Of The Blind Only If He Arrives There In Full Possession Of His Partial Faculties--that Is, Providing He Is Perfectly Aware Of The Precise Nature Of Sight And Does Not Confuse It With Second Sightnor With Madness.

What A Joy It Is To Dance And Sing!

That Is What I'm Looking Forward To The Most, Practical Learning. I Want To Be A Registered Nurse So Getting To Talk To People Who Already Work In Those Jobs Can Really Teach Me What To Expect When I Get Out In The Real World.

Some Cities Are Women And Must Be Loved; Others Are Men And Can Only Be Admired Or Bargained With

The Notion Of A Universality Of Human Experience Is A Confidence Trick And The Notion Of A Universality Of Female Experience Is A Clever Confidence Trick.

Those Are The Voices Of My Brothers, Darling; I Love The Company Of Wolves.

The Clown May Be The Source Of Mirth, But - Who Shall Make The Clown Laugh?

He Is, I Think, Already Pondering A Magisterial Project: That Of Buggering The English Language, The Ultimate Revenge Of The Colonialised.

We Do Not Go To Bed In Single Pairs; Even If We Choose Not To Refer To Them, We Still Drag There With Us The Cultural Impedimenta Of Our Social Class, Our Parents' Lives, Our Bank Balances, Our Sexual And Emotional Expectations, Our Whole Biographies-all The Bits And Pieces Of Our Unique Existences.

There Is A Striking Resemblance Between The Act Of Love And The Ministrations Of A Torturer.

There Was A House We All Had In Common And It Was Called The Past, Even Though We'd Lived In Different Rooms.

F.r. Leavis's "eat Up Your Broccoli" Approach To Fiction Emphasises This Junkfood/wholefood Dichotomy. If Reading A Novel--for Theeighteenth Century Reader, The Most Frivolous Of Diversions--did Not, By The Middle Of The Twentieth Century, Make You A Better Person In Some Way, Then You Might As Well Flush The Offending Volume Down The Toilet, Which Was By Far The Best Place For The Undigested Excreta Of Dubious Nourishment.

And, Oh God, In My Misspent Youth As A Housewife, I, Too, Used To Bake Bread, In Those Hectic And Desolating Days Just Prior To The Woman's Movement, When Middle-class Women Were Supposed To Be Wonderful Wives And Mothers, Gracious Hostesses.... I Used To Feel So Womanly When I Was Baking My Filthy Bread.

One Day, Annabel Saw The Sun And Moon In The Sky At The Same Time. The Sight Filled Her With A Terror Which Entirely Consumed Her And Did Not Leave Her Until The Night Closed In Catastrophe For She Had No Instinct For Self-preservation If She Was Confronted By Ambiguities.

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.

You Were The Living Image Of The Entire Platonic Shadow Show, An Illusion That Could Fill My Emptiness With Marvellous, Imaginary Things As Long As, Just As Long As, The Movie Lasted, And Then All Would All Vanish.

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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.

I Haven't Changed Much, Over The Years. I Use Less Adjectives, Now, And Have A Kinder Heart, Perhaps.

To Pin Your Hopes Upon The Future Is To Consign Those Hopes To A Hypothesis, Which Is To Say, A Nothingness. Here And Now Is What We Must Contend With.

Spindly Branches Of Buttercups Were Secreted Among Gleaming Stems Still Moist At The Roots From Last Night's Rain That Had Washedand Refreshed The Entire Wood, Had Dowered It In Poignant Transparency, The Unique, Inconsolable Quality Of Rainy Countries, As If All Was Glimpsed Through Tears.

Anticipation Is The Greater Part Of Pleasure.

His 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.

Women's Sexy Underwear Is A Minor But Significant Growth Industry Of Late-twentieth-century Britain In The Twilight Of Capitalism.

...in Their Millenial And Long-lived Patience They Knew Quite Well How, In A Hundred Years, Or A Thousand Years' Time, Or Else, Perhaps, Tomorrow, In An Hour's Time, For It Was All A Gamble, A Million To One Chance, But All The Same There Was A Chance That If They Kept On Shaking Their Chains, One Day, Some Day, The Clasps Upon The Shackles Would Part.

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.

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I Think The Adjective Post-modernist Really Means Mannerist. Books About Books Is Fun But Frivolous.

For Hours, For Days, For Years, She Had Wandered Endlessly Within Herself But Never Met Anybody, Nobody.

There's A Theory, One I Find Persuasive, That The Quest For Knowledge Is, At Bottom, The Search For The Answer To The Question: Where Was I Before I Was Born. In The Beginning Was What? Perhaps, In The Beginning, There Was A Curious Room, A Room Like This One, Crammed With Wonders; And Now The Room And All It Contains Are Forbidden You, Although It Was Made Just For You, Had Been Prepared For You Since Time Began, And You Will Spend All Your Life Trying To Remember It.

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?

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In The Mythic Schema Of All Relations Between Men And Women, Man Proposes, And Woman Is Disposed Of.

I Desire Therefore I Exist.

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I Always Used To Suffer A Great Deal If I Let Myself Get Too Close To Reality Since The Definitive World Of The Everyday With Itshard Edges And Harsh Light Did Not Have Enough Resonance To Echo The Demands I Made Upon Experience. It Was As If I Never Experienced Experience As Experience. Living Never Lived Up To The Expectations I Had Of It--the Bovary Syndrome.

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My Mother Learned That She Was Carrying Me At About The Same Time The Second World War Was Declared; With The Family Talent For Magic Realism, She Once Told Me She Had Been To The Doctor's On The Very Day.

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Mother Is In Herself A Concrete Denial Of The Idea Of Sexual Pleasure Since Her Sexuality Has Been Placed At The Service Of Reproductive Function Alone. She Is The Perpetually Violated Passive Principle; Her Autonomy Has Been Sufficiently Eroded By The Presence Within Her Of The Embryo She Brought To Term. Her Unthinking Ability To Reproduce, Which Is Her Pride, Is, Since It Is Beyond Choice, Not A Specific Virtue Of Her Own.

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Sade Has A Curious Ability To Render Every Aspect Of Sexuality Suspect, So That We See How The Chaste Kiss Of The Sentimental Lover Differs Only In Degree From The Vampirish Love-bite That Draws Blood, We Understand That A Disinterested Caress Is Only Quantitatively Different From A Disinterested Flogging.

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I See Her As A Series Of Marvellous Shapes Formed At Random In The Kaleidoscope Of Desire.

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The End Of All Stories, Even If The Writer Forebears To Mention It, Is Death, Which Is Where Time Stops Short. Sheherezade Knew This, Which Is Why She Kept On Spinning Another Story Out Of The Bowels Of The Last One, Never Coming To A Point Where She Could Say: "this Is The End." Because It Would Have Been.

Is Not This World An Illusion? And Yet It Fools Everybody.

And Each Stroke Of His Tongue Ripped Off Skin After Successive Skin, All The Skins Of A Life In The World, And Left Behind A Nascent Patina Of Shining Hairs. My Earrings Turned Back To Water And Trickled Down My Shoulders; I Shrugged The Drops Off My Beautiful Fur.

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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.

Cats Of All Kinds Weave In And Out Of The Text; Burroughs Has Clearly Taken To Them In A Big Way In His Old Age And Seems Torn Between A Fear They Will Betray Him Into Sentimentality And A Resigned Acceptance That A Man Can't Be Ironic All The Time.

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I Will Tell You What Jeanne Was Like. She Was Like A Piano In A Country Where Everyone Has Had Their Hands Cut Off.

Our Fingernails Match Our Toenails, Match Our Lipstick Match Our Rouge...the Habit Of Applying Warpaint Outlasts The Battle.

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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.

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Why Do You Do Up Your Hair In Those Tortured Plaits, Now, Melanie? Why? Because, She Said. You Know That's No Answer. You're Spoiling Your Pretty Looks, Pet. Come Here. She Did Not Move. He Ground Out His Cigarette On The Window-ledge And Laughed. Come Here, He Said Again, Softly. So She Went.

To Ride A Bicycle Is In Itself Some Protection Against Superstitious Fears, Since The Bicycle Is The Product Of Pure Reason Applied To Motion. Geometry At The Service Of Man! Give Me Two Spheres And A Straight Line And I Will Show You How Far I Can Take Them. Voltaire Himself Might Have Invented The Bicycle, Since It Contributes So Much To Man’s Welfare And Nothing At All To His Bane. Beneficial To The Health, It Emits No Harmful Fumes And Permits Only The Most Decorous Speeds. How Can A Bicycle Ever Be An Implement Of Harm?

Among The Monsters, I Am Well Hidden; Who Looks For A Leaf In A Forest?

He Was A Lovely Man In Many Ways. But He Kept On Insisting On Forgiving Me When There Was Nothing To Forgive.

If Miss Means Respectably Unmarried, And Mrs. Respectably Married, Then Ms. Means Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink.

The Lovely Hazard Girls', They Used To Call Them. Huh. Lovely Is As Lovely Does; If They Looked Like What They Behave Like, They'd Frighten Little Children.

Love Is Desire Sustained By Unfulfilment.

I Drew The Curtains To Conceal The Sight Of My Father's Farewell; My Spite Was Sharp As Broken Glass.

If The Barbarians Are Destroyed, Who Will We Then Be Able To Blame For The Bad Things?

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.

I Should Have Liked To Have Had Him Beside Me In A Glass Coffin, So That I Could Watch Him All The Time And He Would Not Have Been Able To Get Away From Me.

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Drosselmeier Had Unwittingly Exposed Himself To An Overdose Of Reality, And It Had Destroyed His Reason.

How Far Does A Pretence Of Feeling, Maintained With Absolute Conviction, Become Authentic?

Iconic Clothing Has Been Secularized. . . . A Guardsman In A Dress Uniform Is Ostensibly An Icon Of Aggression; His Coat Is Red As The Blood He Hopes To Shed. Seen On A Coat-hanger, With No Man Inside It, The Uniform Loses All Its Blustering Significance And, To The Innocent Eye Seduced By Decorative Colour And Tactile Braid, It Is As Abstract In Symbolic Information As A Parasol To An Eskimo. It Becomes Simply Magnificent.

Mother 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.

The Bed Is Now As Public As The Dinner Table And Governed By The Same Rules Of Formal Confrontation.

His Main Principles Were Indeed As Follows: Everything It Is Possible To Imagine Can Also Exist.

With That, The Poignant Charm Vanished. Inside The Fifth Machine, All Was Rampant Malignity. Deformed Flowers Thrust Monstrous Horned Tusks And Trumpets Ending In Blaring Teeth Through The Crimson Walls, Rending Them; The Ravenous Garden Slavered Over Its Prey And Every Brick Was Shown In The Act Of Falling. Amid The Violence Of This Transformation, The Oblivion Of The Embrace Went On. The Awakened Girl, In All Her Youthful Loveliness, Still Clasped In The Arms Of A Lover From Whom All The Flesh Had Fallen. He Was A Grinning Skeleton.

A Broken Heart Is Never A Tragedy. Only Untimely Death Is A Tragedy.

Midnight, And The Clock Strikes. It Is Christmas Day, The Werewolves Birthday, The Door Of The Solstice Still Wide Enough Open To Let Them All Slink Through.

It's Every Woman's Tragedy, That, After A Certain Age, She Looks Like A Female Impersonator. Mind You, We've Known Some Lovely Female Impersonators, In Our Time.

The Kind Of Power Mothers Have Is Enormous.

Strangers Used To Gather Together At The Cinema And Sit Together In The Dark, Like Ancient Greeks Participating In The Mysteries, Dreaming The Same Dream In Unison.

Reading A Book Is Like Re-writing It For Yourself. You Bring To A Novel, Anything You Read, All Your Experience Of The World. You Bring Your History And You Read It In Your Own Terms.

Nothing Is A Matter Of Life And Death Except Life And Death.

All Artists, They Say, Are A Little Mad. This Madness Is, To A Certain Extent, A Self-created Myth Designed To Keep The Generality Away From The Phenomenally Close-knit Creative Community. Yet, In The World Of The Artists, The Consciously Eccentric Are Always Respectful And Admiring If Those Who Have The Courage To Be Genuinely A Little Mad.

Home Is Where The Heart Is And Hence A Movable Feast.

Home Is Where The Heart Is

She Stood Lost In Eternity Wearing A Crazy Dress, Watching The Immense Sky.

What Would The Daughters Of The Rich Do With Themselves If The Poor Ceased To Exist?

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