Nights at the Circus Quotes

“The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“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, Nights at the Circus

“The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?”
― Angela Carter , Nights at the Circus

“And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“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, Nights at the Circus

“She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Despair is the constant companion of the clown.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it!”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Wherein does a woman’s honour reside, old chap? In her vagina or in her spirit?”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“...is it not to the mercies of the eyes of others that we commit ourselves on our journey through the world?”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“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, Nights at the Circus

“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, Nights at the Circus

“Sometimes it seems' said Grok, 'that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks, man eating fish waiting to gobble up your being and give you another instead...”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they're likely to have amongst themselves too keep them all in order”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“all white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Fevvers felt that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations n order to be a woman. She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“I saw before me a mansion in the Gothic style, all ivied over, and, above the turrets, floated a fingernail moon with a star in its arms.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Herşeye karşın onun kişiliğinde hâlâ eksik kalmış birşeyler vardı. Mobilyalı olarak kiraya verilmiş bir eve benziyordu. [sf 11]”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“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, Nights at the Circus

“What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any other century at all, for that matter, was a rum notion. Had the global plebiscite been acted upon in a democratic manner, the twentieth century would have forthwith ceased to exist, the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned and time, by popular consent, would have stood still.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Bu tatlı seste sanki tekinsiz olan bir şey varmış, ya bu sesin sahibi büyücüymüş ya da bir büyünün etkisindeymiş gibi geldi odadakilere. Üçü de tüylerinin diken diken olduğunu hissettiler. [sf 184]”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus