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Book: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Quotes of Book: The Bloody Chamber and Other
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  1. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them...
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  2. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly
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  3. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion.
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  4. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    You must not think my father valued me at less than a king's ransom; but, at no more than a king's ransom.
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  5. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    For now my skin was my sole capital in the world and today I'd make my first investment.
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  6. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    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 thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence, but because of its very gravity...and I began to shudder, like a race horse before a race, yet also witha kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls ofarum lilies that filled my bedroom in great glass jars, those undertakers' lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him;that are white. And stain you.
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  7. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    He carries on his frail shoulders a weird burden of fear; he is cast in the role of the corpse-eater, the body-snatcher who invades the last privacies of the dead. He is white as leprosy, with scrabbling fingernails, and nothing deters him. If you stuff a corpse with garlic, why, he only slavers at the treat: cadavre provençale. He will use the holy cross as a scratching post and crouch above the font to thirstily lap up holy water."
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  8. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    When he combs his hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall out of it; they rustle and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and he can stand as still as a tree, when he wants the doves to flutter softly, crooning as they come, down upon his shoulders, those silly, fat, trusting woodies with the pretty wedding rings round their necks. He makes his whistles out of an elder twig and that is what he uses to call the birds out of the air--all the birds come; and the sweetest singers he will keep in cages.
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  9. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphic weather, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to venture out late, scuttling along by the churchyard wall with half a juicy torso slung across his back. The white light scours the fields and scours them again until everything gleams and he will leave paw-prints in the hoar-frost when he runs howling round the graves at night in his lupine fiestas."
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  10. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    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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  11. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    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 the starved brain; it gasps: 'Luxury! more luxury!' But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flocking against the windowpanes to mock my father's expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devil's picture books.
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  12. Angela Carter _ The Bloody Chamber and Other

    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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