The Lady of the House of Love Quotes

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the window of her eyes and this is very frightening.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“(And could love free me from the shadows? Can a caged bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?)”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“And the light, I must apologise for the lack of light... a hereditary affliction of the eyes…”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“he herself will serve them coffee in tiny, cracked cups of precious porcelain and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit in the other, gaping at the beautiful Countess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates she is inconsolable. She would like to caress their lean, brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. When she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they can scarcely believe their luck.

Afterwards, her governess will tidy the remains into a neat pile and wrap it in its own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the garden. The blood on the Countess' cheeks will be mixed with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a little silver toothpick, to get rid of the fragments of skin and bone that have lodged there.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority. She
believes that, by ignoring it, she can abnegate it. More than anything, she
would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. The
Tarot always shows the same configuration: always she turns up La Papesse, Le Mort, Le Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“Now all shun the village below the chateau in which the beautiful queen of the vampires helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“The waxen fingers of the Countess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called L'Amoureux. Never, never before… never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving L'Amoureux. She shakes, she trembles, her great eyes close beneath her finely veined, nervously throbbing eyelids; the lovely cartomancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love and death.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love