The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Quotes

“I desire therefore I exist.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“Do you not feel’, said the Doctor in his very soft but still crisp-edged voice, ‘that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“Abandoned lovers were often lured into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: WHEN YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“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 definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me, I palpitate!”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“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.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“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.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman