Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Interpretation
The quote personifies cities, attributing gender characteristics to them, which reflects cultural perceptions.
Angela Carter's quote creatively assigns gender identities to cities, suggesting that each city embodies specific traits typically associated with masculinity or femininity. London is portrayed as masculine, Paris as feminine, and New York as a balanced amalgamation, challenging conventional gender binaries and promoting a more nuanced understanding of identity and urban life.
In practice
During a lecture on urban culture, I quoted, 'Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual' to illustrate the different vibes of major cities.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written β heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
We declared war on terror-it's not even a noun, so, good luck.
There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or the logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane.
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.
Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.
I've always been fascinated with the stealing of innocence. It's the most heinous crime, and certainly a capital crime if there ever was one.
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