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.
There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.
I like the religion that teaches liberty, equality and fraternity.
In order to acquire anything in the physical universe, you have to relinquish your attachment to it. This doesn't mean you give up your intention to create your desire...and you don't give up the desire. You give up your attachment to the result.
What gives value to travel is fear. It is a fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country, we are seized by a vague fear and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. I look upon it more as an occasion for testing.
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.