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4375ff0
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I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I tho..
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Angela Carter |
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a3a04ef
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I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason.
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virginity
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Angela Carter |
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eb3033b
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What big eyes you have. Eyes of an incomparable luminosity, the numinous phosphorescence of the eyes of lycanthropes. The gelid green of your eyes fixes my reflective face; It is a preservative, like a green liquid amber; it catches me. I am afraid I will be trapped in it for ever like the poor little ants and flies that stuck their feet in resin before the sea covered the Baltic. He winds me into the circle of his eye on a reel of birdsong..
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obsession
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Angela Carter |
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6642c31
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Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone.
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Angela Carter |
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e9445ea
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Although so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip round the Carpathians. 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 bicy..
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angela carter |
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1223054
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She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her queen and she hit me." Though, he recalled, not sufficiently brutally to require that he tie her wrists together with his belt, force her to kneel and beat her until she toppled over sideways. She raised a strangely joyous face to him; the pallor of her skin and the almost miraculous lustre of her eyes startled and even awed him."
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passions
logic
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Angela Carter |
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d6f2c16
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She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked after the poor and laid their tender napes beneath a husband's booted foot, and even if he brought home cabfuls of half-naked chorus girls and had them dance on the rich round mahogany dining-table (rosily reflecting great pearly hams and bums in its polished depth..
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women
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Angela Carter |
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12960a4
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A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.
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Angela Carter |
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e4fad01
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It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.
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Angela Carter |
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959f934
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But needs must when the devil drives.
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Angela Carter |
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2c0be05
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If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us - mounts and riders, both - could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars thumble out.
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religion
sarcastic-observations
fairytales
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Angela Carter |
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34ddf7d
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Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.
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Angela Carter |
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2e68c43
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There had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils.
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smell
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Angela Carter |
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71fe4e6
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Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real.
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Angela Carter |
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0e3c17e
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The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather - these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever o..
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Angela Carter |
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9ed1a61
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The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory - at best, a falsifying receptacle - but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, pas..
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Angela Carter |
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ef69214
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The enchantment of that bright, sad, pretty place enveloped her and she found that, against all her expectations, she was happy there.
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Angela Carter |
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2f119e8
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Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.
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Angela Carter |
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af83fcc
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Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality.
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revenge
heterosexuality
wound
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Angela Carter |
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dffc8f1
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He is a carnival figure made of papier mache and crepe hair; and yet he has the Devil's knack at cards.
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Angela Carter |
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5697c6c
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Her face. And she smiling. For a moment, just that moment, you would have thought it was May morning.
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Angela Carter |
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db12214
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Sometimes he lays his head on my lap and lets me comb his lovely hair for him; his combings are leaves of every tree in the wood and dryly susurrate around my feet.
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Angela Carter |
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9a5e7c7
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The real value of a sexually attractive woman in a world which regards good looks as a commodity depends on the degree to which she puts her looks to work for her.
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Angela Carter |
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fb9acbe
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Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.
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Angela Carter |
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48e03b8
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It was the fault of the wedding-dress night, when she married the shadows and the world ended.
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Angela Carter |
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d814f34
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She walked in technicolor.
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Angela Carter |
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d8513af
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My father lost me to the Beast at cards
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feminist
gothic
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Angela Carter |
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5d4d854
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all cats have a Spanish tinge although Puss himself elegantly lubricates his virile, muscular, native Bergamasque with French, since that is the only language in which you can purr.
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french-language
purring
french
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Angela Carter |
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9abb42c
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The touch of her hand filled me with a wild loneliness.
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Angela Carter |
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979c06a
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step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague. The
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Angela Carter |
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98dd4f0
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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.
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Angela Carter |
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b16c2d8
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a great future behind him, already
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writer
future
old
waste
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Angela Carter |
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723d7f9
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Their reflections merged together, rippling on the dark surface of the mirror that recorded only the intermittent pale blurs of their faces and the gracious, rocking-chair, three-hour rhythm of their bodies, spinning between the waltzing walls. Laughing, breathless, they whirled to the invisible rhetoric of a hundred violins. The patches of candlelight illuminated only their feet for odd moments, and then they were back, dancing in darkness..
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Angela Carter |
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b92fea4
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ESCAPING SLOWLY
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Angela Carter |
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166043d
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I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.
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Angela Carter |
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28f80be
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But one story in this book, 'How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales', shows just how much fairy stories could change a woman's desires, and how much a man might fear that change, would go to any lenghts to keep her from pleasure, as if pleasure itself threatened his authority. Which, of course, it did. It still does.
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Angela Carter |
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a42d9d5
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Finn is Daddy,' said Victoria with fat satisfaction. 'Not yet,' said Finn. 'But we'll christen the first one Proximity.' Melanie choked on a mouthful.
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Angela Carter |
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6302363
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Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.
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Angela Carter |
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11623c6
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She is obscene to the extent to which she is beautiful. Her beauty, her submissiveness and the false expectations that these qualities will do her some good are what make her obscene.
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Angela Carter |
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93c140d
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The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.
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Angela Carter |
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95f8e20
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Fevvers felt that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations n order to be a woman. She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea.
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woman
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Angela Carter |
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90cac57
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He grudgingly admitted what she had already guessed, that he disliked the presence of servants because, she thought, a constant human presence would remind him too bitterly of his otherness [...]
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Angela Carter |
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3b4349f
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There's a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon trees grow. We come from countries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think you've come to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South infects th..
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Angela Carter |
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3c01f5e
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And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he was alive from the desire of the woods.
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Angela Carter |