Angela Carter

Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.

The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.

I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it.

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.

he sensed a rare talent for corruption.

pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.

Nearly all Carter’s writing is strikingly full of cultural and intertextual references – you could spend five years on an annotation of The Bloody Chamber – but this story is extremely so. It is an artfully constructed edifice of signs and allusions and clues

This is my room. We don’t share. We’ve always respected one another’s privacy. Identical, well and good; Siamese, no.

And I give a little shiver because suddenly I know, I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today. Something exciting. Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkey’s. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living.