381 Quotes by Angela Carter

To obtain his precious orgasm, the libertine must now hunt it down single-mindedly through seas of blood and excrement.

Sin and contraception aside, anal intercourse has an egalitarian lure for Sade. If sexual relations are implicitly political in Sade, the sexual act, among equals, is one of mutual if sequential dominance.

Excretion is his first concrete production and, through it, the child gains his first experience of labour relations. He may reserve the right to go on excremental strike or to engage in a form of faecal offensive. The excremental faculty is a manipulative device and to be baulked of the free control of it is to be deprived of the first, most elementary, expression of autonomy.

You never saw such a wild thing as my mother.

Sade's work, with its compulsive attraction for the delinquent imagination of the romantics, has been instrumental in shaping aspects of the modern sensibility; its paranoia, its despair, its sexual terrors, its omnivorous egocentricity, its tolerance of massacre, holocaust, annihilation.

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 sight, nor with the mind's eye's visions, nor with madness.

How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.

Watching a film was like being a voyeur, living vicariously.

They were dirty and common. She hated to use the word "common", only common people called other people "common"; her mother taught her that.