“perfect transparency must be impenetrable”
“vertical bars” “sulphur-yellow” “grey clouds”
“russet slime” “dead bracken” “lancinating cold”
“stark elders have an anorexic look”
“haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being”
“The woods enclose.” “the wood swallows you up”
“you must stay there until it lets you out again” “subtle labyrinth”
“she will be trapped in her own illusion” “here everything is exactly as it seems”
“the woods enclose then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes”
“it is easy to lose yourself in these woods”
“as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into sound”
“I felt I was in a house of nets”
(isolated line) “Erl-King will do you grievous harm.”
“as desolate as if it came from the throat of the last bird alive”
“wild things, who have all the time in the world”
“reddish hare” “rusty fox” “trunk of a scarlet rowan”
“uncanny whiteness” “gleaming like a goat of snow” “bleated softly”
“his irrevocable hand” “there are some eyes that can eat you”
“he came alive from the desire of the woods”
“the brambles, he says the Devil spits on them at Michaelmas”
“he knows all about the wood and the creatures in it” (repetition of) “he told me”
“he said the owl was a baker’s daughter; then, he smiled at me”
“his kitchen shakes and shivers with birdsong from cage upon cage of singing birds”
“a wall of trapped birds” “How cruel it is, to keep wild birds in cages!”
“white, pointed teeth” “a sweet, acrid smoke, a bright, glancing flame”
“I always go to the Erl-King” “I lie at the mercy of his huge hands”
“He is the tender butcher who showed me that the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says!”
“those silly, fat, trusting woodies with the pretty wedding rings around their necks”
“the cold air that blows over graveyards always goes with him” “I am not afraid of him”
“he could thrust me into the seed-bed of the next generation” “until he whistled me up from my darkness”
“I come, like any other trusting thing that perches on the crook of his wrist”
“dead leaves, some the colour of honey, some the colour of cinders”
“that was the way I walked into the bird-haunted solitude of the Erl-King”
“rattle of the rain on the roof”
“I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses”
“How sweet I roamed, or rather, used to roam”
“he drew me towards him on his magic lasso of inhuman music”
“if I strung that old fiddle with your hair” “better music than the shrill prothalamions of of the larks stacked in pretty cages”
“he strips me to my last nakedness” “dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and encompassing it might be made of water”
“we are like two halves of a seed” “I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me”
“his touch both consoles and devastates me” “I feel my heart pulse, then wither”
“this innocent” “eat me, drink me”
“his dress of water, this garment that drenches me [...] its capacity for drowning”
“such appalling succulence”
“the light from the fire sucked into the black vortex of his eye”
“eyes as green as apples. Green as dead sea fruit.”
“what big eyes you have”
“I am afraid I will be trapped in it forever”
“I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and consumed by you”
“I have seen the cage you are weaving for me” “terrible fear”
“I loved him with all my heart yet I had no desire to join the whistling congregation”
“his embraces were his enticements, and yet, oh yet! They were the branches of which the trap itself was woven”
“I don’t know what tunes you might play on it, if it was strung again”
“the birds don’t sing, they only cry” “the corrosive pools of his regard”
“I shall” “as he lies half dreaming, half waking”
“with hands as gentle as rain, I will strangle him with them”
“then she will open all the cages” “they will change back into young girls” “each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite on their throats”
“discordant music without a hand touching it”
“the bow will dance over the strings of its own accord”
“they will cry out, “Mother, mother, you have murdered me!”
NOTE: I didn't learn all of these for the exam, neither should this be considered a total, complete list. Just a handy selection of quotes that I found covered most of the main themes of The Erl Kin by Angela Carter!
NOTE: I didn't learn all of these for the exam, neither should this be considered a total, complete list. Just a handy selection of quotes that I found covered most of the main themes of The Erl Kin by Angela Carter!
