Quotes From "Nights At The Circus" By Angela Carter

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 was the broken blossom of the present tense. Angela Carter

She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movement under her eyelids, and the somnolent gestures of her hands and feet, it seems as if her dreams grow more urgent and intense, as if the life she lives in the closed world of dreams is now about to possess her utterly, as if her small, increasingly reluctant wakenings were an interpretation of some more vital existence, so she is loath to spend even those necessary moments of wakefulness with us, wakings strange as her sleepings. Her marvellous fate - a sleep more lifelike than the living, a dream which consumes the world.' And, sir, ' concluded Fevvers, in a voice that now took on the sombre, majestic tones of a great organ, 'we do believe . . her dream will be the coming century.' And, oh, God . how frequently she weeps! . Angela Carter

We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity. Angela Carter

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. Angela Carter

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. Angela Carter

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue. Angela Carter

And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat. Angela Carter

Despair is the constant companion of the clown. Angela Carter

And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape. Angela Carter

She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds. Angela Carter

Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment! Angela Carter

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh? Angela Carter

...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play. Angela Carter

From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect. Angela Carter