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c48eb30
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Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.
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Angela Carter |
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fe53a49
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Everything went black in the shocking folds of his embrace. She was very startled and near to sobbing. 'Caw, caw,' echoed his raincoat. 'Don't be frightened,' he said. 'It is only poor Finn, who will do you no harm.' She recovered herself a little, though she was still trembling. She could see her own face reflected in little in the black pupils of his subaqueous eyes. She still looked the same. She saluted herself. He was only a little tal..
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Angela Carter |
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cbfa984
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Wherein does a woman's honour reside, old chap? In her vagina or in her spirit?
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Angela Carter |
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dee1514
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Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!
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Angela Carter |
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8ba82a3
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I am the lady of the castle. My name is exile. My name is anguish. My name is longing. Far from the world on the windy crests of the mountain, I am kept in absolute seclusion, my time passes in an endless reverie, a perpetual swooning. I am both the Sleeping Beauty and the enchanted castle; the princess drowses in the castle of her flesh.
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Angela Carter |
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f6c0cb9
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They say there's an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on.
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wolves
wolf
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Angela Carter |
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4f1fb4e
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But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practise such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else's house as you passed by the window.
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angela-carter
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Angela Carter |
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adc4388
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I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking.
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Angela Carter |
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9ae7891
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I am happy only in that I am a monster.
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Angela Carter |
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544160c
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Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it!
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Angela Carter |
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281fc0d
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The lilies i always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.
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Angela Carter |
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208448a
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Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?
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luminous
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Angela Carter |
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161121e
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Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her.
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Angela Carter |
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94d53cb
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She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.
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women
the-loves-of-lady-purple
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Angela Carter |
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672f339
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Sometimes it seems' said Grok, 'that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks, man eating fish..
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Angela Carter |
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de606a9
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What are the butcherly delights of meat? These are not sensual but analytical. The satisfaction of scientific curiosity in dissection. A clinical pleasure in the precision with which the process of reducing the living, moving, vivid object to the dead status of thing is accomplished. The pleasure of watching the spectacle of the slaughter that derives from the knowledge one is disassociated from the spectacle; the bloody excitation of the a..
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Angela Carter |
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0ad73bc
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People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed.
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sf
genre
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Angela Carter |
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67a44df
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He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance.
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Angela Carter |
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045dc06
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She was too young, too soft and new, to come to terms with these wild beings whose minds veered at crazy angles from the short, straight, smooth lines of her own experience.
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Angela Carter |
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6213fdb
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If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past and the corrosive effects of perpetual physical discomfort on the nerves, then we have mercifully forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours -- ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors..
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Angela Carter |
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8213a00
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Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.
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Angela Carter |
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58b3a5d
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Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a willfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over t..
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Angela Carter |
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461c20f
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His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you would bear me.
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physical
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Angela Carter |
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f2bad2e
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all white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched
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Angela Carter |
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e399210
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MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub! AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh. MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow. AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definiti..
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flesh
shadow
desire
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Angela Carter |
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1f7e909
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They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other's phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of pleasures but, connoisseurs of unreality as they were, they could not bear the crude weight, the rank smell and the ripe taste of real flesh. It is always a dangerous experiment to act out a fantasy; they had undertaken the experiment rashly and ha..
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sex
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Angela Carter |
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d97154b
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His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat. After the terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who'd escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon m..
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Angela Carter |
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f7621aa
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Sometimes it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones gave to his face the aspect of a mask.
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burning-your-boats
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Angela Carter |
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7464f8e
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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.
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Angela Carter |
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06d2bac
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The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth.
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Angela Carter |
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ca8b78d
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I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: "What is the most miraculous event in the world?" And I answer myself: "I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit."
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Angela Carter |
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d4df3f6
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Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her..
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loneliness
sadness
the-bloody-chamber
the-lady-of-the-house-of-love
vampire
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Angela Carter |
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43e49a3
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ruin had been the original blueprint and men and women had lived here only in a necessary but intermediate stage of the execution of the grand design
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Angela Carter |
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09f75f6
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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.
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Angela Carter |
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7cecb16
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Below me, in spreading, concentric circles, like those a fish makes when it rises in still water, spun round the lower tiers; above me arched the black sky pierced by the gas jets of the stars.
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Angela Carter |
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6c0e252
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I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.
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Angela Carter |
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aa8bb83
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The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.
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other
ritual
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Angela Carter |
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4e3faa4
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The heart's egoism sees itself suffering when it sees another suffering and so it learns sympathy, because it can put itself into another's place; then the heart comes a little way out of its egoism and tentatively encounters the world. But, before the prospect of its own suffering, the heart melts completely and retreats into egoism, again, to protect itself.
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Angela Carter |
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297729b
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She goes out at night more often now; the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significance.
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Angela Carter |
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c710e29
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The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they're likely to have amongst themselves too keep them all in order
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Angela Carter |
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577b81e
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Herseye karsin onun kisiliginde hala eksik kalmis birseyler vardi. Mobilyali olarak kiraya verilmis bir eve benziyordu. [sf 11]
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sirk-geceleri
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Angela Carter |
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9dc04d5
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is it not to the mercies of the eyes of others that we commit ourselves on our journey through the world?
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judgement
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Angela Carter |
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99c2491
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I've changed a lot since 1969, and so has the world; I'm more benign, the world is far bleaker, and the people in would now be edging nervously up to the middle age they thought could never happen, they thought the world would end first.
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Angela Carter |
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61e0a30
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Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: "It can't last." She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she w..
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the-present
memory
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Angela Carter |