The Carnivorous Lamb Quotes

“Whether you come as a lover or an executioner, I am ready to receive you.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“A priest is an enemy of society disguised as a sheep."

Mother laughed.

"No, professor!" burst out Antonio. "Maybe they dressed up as sheep in your day. Now, they don't even bother anymore."

"You're right about that, young man. In my time, they were killers. Today, they can't kill anymore, so they terrorize people and inform on them instead. It comes to the same thing.”
― Agustín Gómez-Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Without Mother there, all of our psychological mechanisms were rusting from lack of use. Without hate, what good was our love?”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Te quiero porque eres mío. Te quiero porque te poseo. Te quiero porque necesitas amor. Te quiero porque eres el desorden y a mí no me gusta el orden. Te quiero porque cuando me miras, haces que me sienta héroe. Y te quiero, sobre todo, porque al fin he comprendido que no puedo hablar de mi amor a nadie que no seas tú, y que ese es el verdadero amor. También te quiero porque tu contacto me lleva al límite de mi virilidad.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Did Mother ever stop to think that those ‘’shadows’’ fell on me while I was still in her womb? That it was I who had chosen to leave them behind? Did she understand that I put off opening my eyes as an act of courage, so as not to mix up the world I was coming from with the one I was to live in?”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Whether you come as a lover or an executioner, I am ready to recieve you.”
― Agustin Gomez-Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“I know you so well, I can’t describe you”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“For myself, I can’t accept just being her work. I have spent years in Paris and London, purifying myself in shit( please don’t be afraid of that word; I can’t find any other to tell you what my life has been), and I tore up all the letters her estate manager sent to me- yours, hers, even Clara’s( Clara, dead to memory)-one after the other, unread. During all those years, I wanted to be myself.
And now I am.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“I’ve given up condemning that streak of anarchy that was injected into us- into your blood and mine- by someone who wanted us fierce and unyielding, even a little, but I’m starting to wonder. Long before conceiving us, when she was nothing but a wave of pleasure in her own mother’s belly( not even a fetal reality, or a spurt of semen shared by two living people just at the moment when pleasure explodes into delirium, but a mere body sprawled on these white sheets, unable to contain the strength of desire), long before all that, tell me, do you think she already wanted us the way we are?”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“(When I am walking, and I stop, I always think of my favorite poet and the deep rebellion in those words. You make your way by walking; no one else can do it for you. You can’t take a path someone else has made. And yet I had always walked along your path. What a fool I was, to think you’d always be there to clear the way.)”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“The house was dying. All too definite signs pointed to the end of something. I was growing up; maybe that was the death in the air.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“There was no love left for you, no hope. Not only was the world I was bringing you into a grave, but my body was, too- forever. This is why I wanted you to be a ‘’freak’’, as you say, or what I call a ‘cataclysm’. And now I think I wasn’t wrong. You just might have that seed of anarchy I hoped to find in you. I can’t be sure, but I think you are going to destroy everything I hate: the order that devoured me. You aren’t my son, you’re myself. The love I have for you is awkward for both of us. But it is greater than any love known. Even if you can’t understand it.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Too much love, like too much hate, doesn’t need many words: it has no subtlety.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Although none of all this concerned me directly, I still felt it would taint my life forever. A hereditary defect carried in the blood, a virus that lived on for want of antibiotics; the mushroom-bed, always.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“The house, which Mother had inherited, stood for Spain and Spanish inheritance. It harbored every social class, every political persuasion, and above all, silence: that huge, oppressive silence, growing in the darkness of a mushroom-bed, where the simplest word could endanger the tongue that spoke it, that guilty silence, that bird of ill omen whose shadow lengthened across the entire peninsula”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“In one completely unnatural sense, I would forever be her only reason for living. Neither Father nor Antonio fit into her universe, but she felt that in our lack of love we could establish between the two of us the deepest bonds of hatred.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“I finally decided that the hose had been built around a pustule of silence existing from the beginning of time, and that my ancestors had moved in without fighting it. Who knows, maybe they liked it, the way a leech settles into the swampy water where the summer goats come to drink.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“It was as if two contrary worlds of light and shadow had settled into the house, juxtaposed without nuances in Manichean precision. To pass from one to the other, you had to change your attitude completely. The eye that gleamed in the light suddenly appeared dull in the shadows, unable to see a complete image. And the beings and objects in the house oscillated constantly between zones of light and shadow, like planets spinning around some capricious sun.
The house itself looked like a plastic-surgery patient suddenly abandoned on the operating table because of a bomb scare: one eye squinting, the other normal, the face half smooth, half wrinkled, one lip sensuously full, the other shrunken with age. Frozen in ugliness. Unfinished in beauty. A freak.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“The joys of a lifetime, you might say. In my nightmares, I sometimes relieve the pain of their birth, and I realize I have never stopped asking myself ‘’Why?’’.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Because, in spite of everything, nobody has yet dared to exclude girlhood from the state of being human, or sever the two completely.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“I don’t know if you follow me, my dear, but it’s simple: what would be the use of all those parlors, if we didn’t create ghosts to inhabit them? Believe it or not, when I sometimes tell you to stay out of my parlor, it isn’t to make you angry. Quite the contrary, it’s to spare you infection. At times, I dream you’re a lady, like me. And I do it just when I want to hurt you.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“A little girl, my dear, is a sin that is paid every attention, to make sure it never turns into virtue. She is taught to hide her thoughts behind false words. Like a doll in a shop window, she learns the gestures of a ritualized imitation of life, and not life itself. She is taught to wear a certain expression: a look of perpetual surprise, always full of innocence, always hungry for rape. A consenting victim. And this is how a child is made into a well brought up girl, as I was.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“My dear, you know that a little girl is a lie, a lie that grows a little every day, but never in the same direction. She’s a chameleon lie, like an artificial flower injected every season with a chemical to make it change color - white today, black tomorrow, day after day, alas, she reaches a point where she shows the world a neutral, undefinable color. She doesn’t stop being a flower, only now, my dear, she is hidden, secret. A hypocritical flower. Forever.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Still, you had the feeling that the house was trying not to complain, trying hard to keep its pain a secret, so as not to burden us, its dear occupants… but it complained all the same, it couldn’t help it. The pain rose from the depths of its foundations. Signs of the disease could be seen with the naked eye: a greenish ooze was always running down the walls, the paint was flacking as if the house were peeling, or rather rotting. It was practically a corpse.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Mother had another way of looking, too, that bored into me when I had my back turned, making a vacuum around me, driving out every molecule of air, of life. Suffocation.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“I have never loved Mother, I know. My feelings for her were quite the reverse. But when I think about it, a sort of deep anxiety knots my stomach: The image of an octopus in my dreams. I don’t know why( Maybe just because she is dead at last).”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“With a clear conscience, I accused Mother of not loving me. I hope I won’t have to accuse you of the same thing. Because if you were her darling, I was yours. This forcefield has locked the three of us together from the very beginning.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“You had been wanted, waited for, created and recreated like one of her embroideries, or like all the first notes of the pieces she played on her piano. I was conceived in carelessness, by accident.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“From the moment Mother first told me ‘’ I never wanted you’’ I undertook to go back in my past to a time before I was born. And I began to understand. She started resenting me the day my fetus swelled her body too much for her to bend elegantly over her damned rosebuch. But I understood that my desire for revenge was too facile, too romantic. I have gone further. I have reached love, or rather the death of love. A commonplace tragedy.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“One can say what one likes about death, but I now understand that it is above all a physical need, like hunger or thirst.”
― Agustin Gomez-Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb