The Bloody Chamber Quotes

?
“Delicious ecstasy of excitement”
The Bloody Chamber
1 of 228
“inspecting horseflesh…inspecting cuts on the slab.”
The Bloody Chamber
2 of 228
“He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were ********* the leaves off an artichoke”
The Bloody Chamber
3 of 228
“examined her, limb by limb… bare as a lamb chop”
The Bloody Chamber
4 of 228
"’the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil’"
The Bloody Chamber
5 of 228
“When he saw my reluctance, his eyes veiled over and yet his appetite did not diminish.”
The Bloody Chamber
6 of 228
“one false step and into the abyss of the dark you stumbled”
The Bloody Chamber
7 of 228
“the morning would find me once more a virgin.”
The Bloody Chamber
8 of 228
“'My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for martyrdom.'”
The Bloody Chamber
9 of 228
“the opulent male scent of leather and spices”
The Bloody Chamber
10 of 228
“his monstrous presence”
The Bloody Chamber
11 of 228
“and I saw, not the massive, irredeemable bulk of my husband but the slight, stooping figure of the piano-tuner”
The Bloody Chamber
12 of 228
“The atrocious loneliness of that monster!“
The Bloody Chamber
13 of 228
“The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury”
The Bloody Chamber
14 of 228
“The faery solitude of the place”
The Bloody Chamber
15 of 228
“that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place”
The Bloody Chamber
16 of 228
“That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place”
The Bloody Chamber
17 of 228
“The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.”
The Bloody Chamber
18 of 228
“They looked like the trumpets of the angels of death.”
The Bloody Chamber
19 of 228
“I was alone, but for my reflection”
The Bloody Chamber
20 of 228
“I had lost. Lost at that charade of innocence and vice in which he had engaged me. Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner.”
The Bloody Chamber
21 of 228
“he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women”
The Bloody Chamber
22 of 228
“I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!”
The Bloody Chamber
23 of 228
"this lovely prison of which I was both the inmate and the mistress”
The Bloody Chamber
24 of 228
“I felt the exhilaration of the explorer.”
The Bloody Chamber
25 of 228
“Absolute darkness. And, about me, the instruments of mutilation”
The Bloody Chamber
26 of 228
“lovers whose embraces were annihilation.”
The Bloody Chamber
27 of 228
“'It is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable”
The Bloody Chamber
28 of 228
“an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”
The Bloody Chamber
29 of 228
“’Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery. '”
The Bloody Chamber
30 of 228
“A lectern, carved like a spread eagle”
The Bloody Chamber
31 of 228
“'My little nun has found the prayerbooks, has she?’”
The Bloody Chamber
32 of 228
“On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger”
The Bloody Chamber
33 of 228
“the road is white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
34 of 228
“the pervasive atmosphere of a suspension of reality”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
35 of 228
“every window of the house blazed with furious light and a fugal baying, as of a pride of lions, introduced his host.”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
36 of 228
“the timeless spell of his house it seemed to possess the radiant and finite quality of dream”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
37 of 228
“air of exhaustion, of despair”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
38 of 228
“Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial.”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
39 of 228
“Do not think she had no will of her own”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
40 of 228
“she experienced a sudden sense of perfect freedom… Yet, with this exhilaration, a desolating emptiness”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
41 of 228
"a lacquer of the invincible prettiness that characterizes certain pampered, exquisite, expensive cats
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
42 of 228
“one last, single, perfect rose … the last rose left living in all the white winter”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
43 of 228
“mazy head of hair, on the eyes green as agate, on the golden hairs”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
44 of 228
“leonine apparition”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
45 of 228
“for a lion is a lion and a man is a man”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
46 of 228
“Loneliness of the Beast”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
47 of 228
“distant, heroic resemblance to the handsomest of all the beasts”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
48 of 228
“she longed for the shabby home of their poverty”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
49 of 228
“she could not bring herself to touch him of her own free will, he was so different from herself.”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
50 of 228
“the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South”
The Tiger's Bride
51 of 228
“Gaping doors and broken windows… suites of vaulted chambers… infinite complexity of the innards of the place”
The Tiger's Bride
52 of 228
“half-derelict façades of sheer red brick”
The Tiger's Bride
53 of 228
“the pretty one, with my glossy, nut-brown curls, my rosy cheeks.”
The Tiger's Bride
54 of 228
“I felt I was at liberty for the first time in my life.”
The Tiger's Bride
55 of 228
“There is a crude clumsiness about his outlines... as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright when he would far rather drop down on all fours”
The Tiger's Bride
56 of 228
“He is a carnival figure”
The Tiger's Bride
57 of 228
“And what, I wondered, might be the exact nature of his 'beastliness'”
The Tiger's Bride
58 of 228
“the tiger-man will come and take you away”
The Tiger's Bride
59 of 228
“The artificial masterpiece of his face appals me.”
The Tiger's Bride
60 of 228
"beasts in *******”
The Tiger's Bride
61 of 228
“horses, noblest of creatures, such wounded sensitivity in their wise eyes, such rational restraint of energy at their high-strung hindquarters.”
The Tiger's Bride
62 of 228
“my shining black companion”- “The Beast, wrapped in a black fur-lined cloak”
The Tiger's Bride
63 of 228
“the six of us--mounts and riders, both”
The Tiger's Bride
64 of 228
"The lamb must learn to run with the tigers”
The Tiger's Bride
65 of 228
“The tiger sat still as a heraldic beast… Nothing about him reminded me of humanity.”
The Tiger's Bride
66 of 228
“a delicate creature… the gentlest creature in the world”
The Tiger's Bride
67 of 228
“my father abandoned me to the wild beasts by his human carelessness”.
The Tiger's Bride
68 of 228
“I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves”
The Tiger's Bride
69 of 228
“She is a marvellous machine… clockwork twin of mine”
The Tiger's Bride
70 of 228
“clicked and jangled into the imitation of life”
The Tiger's Bride
71 of 228
“had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?”
The Tiger's Bride
72 of 228
"send her back to perform the part of my father's daughter.”
The Tiger's Bride
73 of 228
“I felt my breast ripped apart as if I suffered a marvellous wound.”
The Tiger's Bride
74 of 228
“I felt as much atrocious pain as if I was ********* off my own underpelt”
The Tiger's Bride
75 of 228
“white meat of contract”
The Tiger's Bride
76 of 228
“his appetite need not be my extinction”.
The Tiger's Bride
77 of 228
“the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. 'He will lick the skin off me!'”
The Tiger's Bride
78 of 228
“For what lady in all the world could say 'no' to the passionate yet toujours discret advances of a fine marmalade cat?”
Puss-in-Boots
79 of 228
“Do you see these fine, high, shining leather boots of mine?”
Puss-in-Boots
80 of 228
“my habitual smile… we have our smiles, as it were, painted on”
Puss-in-Boots
81 of 228
“for Tabs and I smile all day long and, these days, we put our hearts in it.”
Puss-in-Boots
82 of 228
“he's handsome enough”
Puss-in-Boots
83 of 228
“he made the beast with two backs with every harlot in the city”
Puss-in-Boots
84 of 228
“moonstruck zany, lovelorn loon”
Puss-in-Boots
85 of 228
“A princess in a tower… Chained to a dolt and dragon-guarded.'”
Puss-in-Boots
86 of 228
“she is the divinity he's come to worship”
Puss-in-Boots
87 of 228
“the very sanctuary of the goddess”
Puss-in-Boots
88 of 228
“an iron-plated, copper-bottomed, sworn man-hater of some sixty bitter winters”
Puss-in-Boots
89 of 228
“his goggle eyes and his limp, his avarice, his gore belly, his rheumaticks, and his flag hangs all the time at half-mast indeed”
Puss-in-Boots
90 of 228
“the lovely lady's lubbery husband hump off on his horse”
Puss-in-Boots
91 of 228
“So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile”
Puss-in-Boots
92 of 228
“the hazard of it draws him”
Puss-in-Boots
93 of 228
“Enough to melt the thorniest heart.”
Puss-in-Boots
94 of 228
“'I'm burning with the fever of love!'”
Puss-in-Boots
95 of 228
"I gave her the customary tribute of a few firm thrusts of my striped loins”
Puss-in-Boots
96 of 228
“convince her her orifice will be your salvation and she's yours.'”
Puss-in-Boots
97 of 228
“no element of the farcical must mar this first, delirious encounter of these lovers, must it.”
Puss-in-Boots
98 of 228
“shows him the target, he displays the dart, scores an instant bullseye. Bravo!”
Puss-in-Boots
99 of 228
“the splendid, feline nakedness of my kind, that offers no concealment of that soul made manifest in the flesh of lovers”
Puss-in-Boots
100 of 228
“these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light”
The Erl King
101 of 228
“there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile… not quite yet, the saddest time of the year”
The Erl King
102 of 228
“there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being”
The Erl King
103 of 228
“The woods enclose… the wood swallows you up”
The Erl King
104 of 228
“the subtle labyrinth”
The Erl King
105 of 228
“All will fall still, all lapse.”
The Erl King
106 of 228
“the bird-haunted solitude of the Erl-King”
The Erl King
107 of 228
“my girlish and delicious loneliness”
The Erl King
108 of 228
“I am not afraid of him; only, afraid of vertigo, of the vertigo with which he seizes me. Afraid of falling down.”
The Erl King
109 of 228
“I have seen the cage you are weaving for me”
The Erl King
110 of 228
“lullabies for foolish virgins”
The Erl King
111 of 228
“softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him”
The Erl King
112 of 228
“His eyes are quite green…There are some eyes can eat you.”
The Erl King
113 of 228
“he came alive from the desire of the woods.”
The Erl King
114 of 228
“the tender butcher”
The Erl King
115 of 228
“so much the spirit of the place”
The Erl King
116 of 228
“Eyes green as apples. Green as dead sea fruit.”
The Erl King
117 of 228
“His embraces were his enticements”
The Erl King
118 of 228
“he lies half dreaming, half waking”
The Erl King
119 of 228
“the sweetest singers he will keep in cages”
The Erl King
120 of 228
“the robin, the friend of man, in spite of the wound in his breast from which Erl-King tore out his heart.”
The Erl King
121 of 228
“A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house”
The Erl King
122 of 228
“she will be trapped in her own illusion”
The Erl King
123 of 228
"I lie at the mercy of his huge hands.”
The Erl King
124 of 228
“the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off come all my clothes.”
The Erl King
125 of 228
“His touch both consoles and devastates me;”
The Erl King
126 of 228
“Midwinter--invincible, immaculate”
The Snow Child
127 of 228
“the whole world was white”
The Snow Child
128 of 228
“The Count and his wife”
The Snow Child
129 of 228
“wrapped in the glittering pelts of black foxes”
The Snow Child
130 of 228
“black, shining boots with scarlet heels, and spurs”
The Snow Child
131 of 228
“'I wish I had a girl as white as snow…red as blood… black as that bird's feather”
The Snow Child
132 of 228
“she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her”
The Snow Child
133 of 228
"bleeds; screams; falls.”
The Snow Child
134 of 228
“nothing left of her but a feather a bird might have dropped; a bloodstain,”
The Snow Child
135 of 228
“now you are at the place of annihilation”
The Lady of the House of Love
136 of 228
“all the roses her dead mother planted have grown up into a huge, spiked wall that incarcerates her”
The Lady of the House of Love
137 of 228
“the great bulk of the mansion above them, whose façade loured over the village”
The Lady of the House of Love
138 of 228
“the dark entrails of the mansion”
The Lady of the House of Love
139 of 228
“down endless corridors, up winding staircases”
The Lady of the House of Love
140 of 228
“this vile and murderous room”
The Lady of the House of Love
141 of 228
“both death and the maiden”.
The Lady of the House of Love
142 of 228
“she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit.”
The Lady of the House of Love
143 of 228
“her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity…a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness”
The Lady of the House of Love
144 of 228
“teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar”
The Lady of the House of Love
145 of 228
“nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition”
The Lady of the House of Love
146 of 228
“a girl with the fragility of the skeleton”
The Lady of the House of Love
147 of 228
“a morbid mouth…a whore’s mouth”
The Lady of the House of Love
148 of 228
“she is like a doll… like a great, ingenious piece of clockwork”
The Lady of the House of Love
149 of 228
“she might be an automaton, made of white velvet and black fur”
The Lady of the House of Love
150 of 228
“She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death”
The Lady of the House of Love
151 of 228
“I was only an invention of darkness”
The Lady of the House of Love
152 of 228
“He has the special quality of virginity… ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia”
The Lady of the House of Love
153 of 228
exemplary fate in the trenches” “rooted in change and time… about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires”
The Lady of the House of Love
154 of 228
"in the invisible… pentacle of his virginity, the young man stepped over the threshold of Nosferatu's castle and did not shiver”
The Lady of the House of Love
155 of 228
“A fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him”
The Lady of the House of Love
156 of 228
“And though he feels unease, he cannot feel terror; so he is like the boy in the fairy tale,”
The Lady of the House of Love
157 of 228
“This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.”
The Lady of the House of Love
158 of 228
“A great, intoxicated surge of the heavy scent of red roses… inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough almost, to fell him.”
The Lady of the House of Love
159 of 228
“I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs”
The Lady of the House of Love
160 of 228
“their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour.”
The Lady of the House of Love
161 of 228
“a sullen mound of drab feathers”
The Lady of the House of Love
162 of 228
“the liquid cascade of the song of a lark, bringing to him, in the heart--had he but known it--of Juliet's tomb, all the freshness of morning”
The Lady of the House of Love
163 of 228
“she only knows of one kind of consummation.”
The Lady of the House of Love
164 of 228
“The bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage bed.”
The Lady of the House of Love
165 of 228
“its eyes roll upwards in a spasm you will mistake for that of love and not of death.”
The Lady of the House of Love
166 of 228
“ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities”
The Lady of the House of Love
167 of 228
“the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes”
The Lady of the House of Love
168 of 228
“she is the hereditary commandant of the army of shadows”
The Lady of the House of Love
169 of 228
“vindictive inhabitants who manifest their presences by shadows…too many shadows”
The Lady of the House of Love
170 of 228
“How can she bear the pain of becoming human?”
The Lady of the House of Love
171 of 228
“The end of exile is the end of being.”
The Lady of the House of Love
172 of 228
“Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest”
The Werewolf
173 of 228
“Harsh, brief, poor lives.”
The Werewolf
174 of 228
“The good child does as her mother bids”
The Werewolf
175 of 228
“scabby coat of sheepskin”
The Werewolf
176 of 228
“The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron”
The Werewolf
177 of 228
“Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered.”
The Werewolf
178 of 228
“The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob… wolves are less brave than they seem”
The Werewolf
179 of 228
“It went for her throat, as wolves do”
The Werewolf
180 of 228
“To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I”
The Werewolf
181 of 228
“the forest close upon her like a pair of jaws”
The Company of Wolves
182 of 228
“carnivore incarnate”
The Company of Wolves
183 of 228
“once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.”
The Company of Wolves
184 of 228
“The wolfsong …in itself a murdering”
The Company of Wolves
185 of 228
“wolves grow lean and famished.”
The Company of Wolves
186 of 228
“slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva”
The Company of Wolves
187 of 228
“irremediable appetites”
The Company of Wolves
188 of 228
“condemn him to wolfishness”
The Company of Wolves
189 of 228
“no sign of a wolf…nor a naked man… [but] a fully clothed one”
The Company of Wolves
190 of 228
“devastating eyes as red as a wound”
The Company of Wolves
191 of 228
“his skin is the colour and texture of vellum”
The Company of Wolves
192 of 228
“the red shawl…[like] blood on snow”
The Company of Wolves
193 of 228
“her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white”
The Company of Wolves
194 of 228
“she is an unbroken egg…a sealed vessel...she is a closed system”
The Company of Wolves
195 of 228
“her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses”
The Company of Wolves
196 of 228
“she knew she was nobody’s meat”
The Company of Wolves
197 of 228
“between the paws of the tender wolf”
The Company of Wolves
198 of 228
“the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside…we cannot keep them out”
The Company of Wolves
199 of 228
“as if the beasts would love to be less beastly”
The Company of Wolves
200 of 228
“we keep the wolves outside by living well”
The Company of Wolves
201 of 228
“she will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt”
The Company of Wolves
202 of 228
“savage marriage ceremony”
The Company of Wolves
203 of 228
“They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths”
The Company of Wolves
204 of 228
“Midnight; and the clock strikes”
The Company of Wolves
205 of 228
“a man, headless, footless, dying, dead.”
The Company of Wolves
206 of 228
“the pelt peeled off again and he was just as he had been”
The Company of Wolves
207 of 228
“he has a wolf’s heart”
The Company of Wolves
208 of 228
“she would have called herself a wolf”
Wolf Alice
209 of 228
“Her pace is not our pace.”
Wolf Alice
210 of 228
“Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf”
Wolf Alice
211 of 228
“She sleeps in the soft, warm ashes of the hearth”
Wolf Alice
212 of 228
“her silence and howling a language as authentic as any language of nature”
Wolf Alice
213 of 228
“the wolves had tended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in animal privacy out of fear of her imperfection”
Wolf Alice
214 of 228
“it seemed to her the congregation in the church was ineffectually attempting to imitate the wolves’ chorus”
Wolf Alice
215 of 228
“She inhabits only the present tense…as without hope as it is without despair.”
Wolf Alice
216 of 228
“the moon, the governess of transformations”
Wolf Alice
217 of 228
“the abyss between her dreams, those wakings strange as sleeping”
Wolf Alice
218 of 228
“the moonlight spilled into the Duke’s motionless bedroom”
Wolf Alice
219 of 228
“he passed through the mirror and now, henceforward, lives as if upon the other side of things”
Wolf Alice
220 of 228
“some kind, possibly, of invisible cage?”
Wolf Alice
221 of 228
“her companion, was in fact, no more than a particularly ingenious variety of the shadow she cast”
Wolf Alice
222 of 228
“first, a formless web of tracery…the in firmer yet still shadowed outline until at last as vivid as life itself”
Wolf Alice
223 of 228
“his eyes see only appetite”
Wolf Alice
224 of 228
“both less and more than a man”
Wolf Alice
225 of 228
“poor, wounded thing…locked half and half between such strange states, an aborted transformation”
Wolf Alice
226 of 228
“a reek of meat”
Wolf Alice
227 of 228
“once-worn ball dresses…heaped in the corners of his bloody chamber”
Wolf Alice
228 of 228

Other cards in this set

Card 2

Front

“inspecting horseflesh…inspecting cuts on the slab.”

Back

The Bloody Chamber

Card 3

Front

“He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were ********* the leaves off an artichoke”

Back

Preview of the front of card 3

Card 4

Front

“examined her, limb by limb… bare as a lamb chop”

Back

Preview of the front of card 4

Card 5

Front

"’the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil’"

Back

Preview of the front of card 5
View more cards

Comments

No comments have yet been made

Similar English Literature resources:

See all English Literature resources »See all The Bloody Chamber resources »