The Erl-King Quotes

“Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I wil become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty.”
― Angela Carter, The Erl-King

“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. There is a black hole in the middle of both your eyes; it is their still centre, looking there makes me giddy, as if I might fall into it.”
― Angela Carter, The Erl-King

“And now I know the birds don't sing, they only cry because they can't find their way out of the wood.”
― Angela Carter, The Erl-King

“His embraces were his enticement and yet, oh yet! they were branches of which the trap itself was woven. But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him.”
― Angela Carter, The Erl-King

“I have seen the cage you are weaving for me; it is a very pretty one and I shall sit, hereafter, in my cage among the other singing birds.”
― Angela Carter, The Erl-King

“I fall down for him, and I know it is only because he is kind to me that I do not fall still further.”
― Angela Carter, The Erl-King