Top 100 Angela Carter Quotes
#1. Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.
Angela Carter
#2. The triumph of the will recreates, as its Utopia, the world of early childhood, and that is a world of nightmare, impotence and fear, in which the child fantasises, out of its own powerlessness, an absolute supremacy.
Angela Carter
#3. It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven't got a family of their own, they will invent one.
Angela Carter
#4. Finn is Daddy,' said Victoria with fat satisfaction.
'Not yet,' said Finn. 'But we'll christen the first one Proximity.'
Melanie choked on a mouthful.
Angela Carter
#5. His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
Angela Carter
#6. For nothing is more boring than being forced to play.
Angela Carter
#7. What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
Angela Carter
#8. The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.
Angela Carter
#9. This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.
Angela Carter
#10. It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.
Angela Carter
#12. The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
Angela Carter
#13. Ironing's nice and simple,' he said. 'I get all tangled up in words when I'm putting together those interminable papers ...
Angela Carter
#14. She goes out at night more often now; the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significance.
Angela Carter
#15. Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.
Angela Carter
#16. They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.
Angela Carter
#17. He grudgingly admitted what she had already guessed, that he disliked the presence of servants because, she thought, a constant human presence would remind him too bitterly of his otherness [ ... ]
Angela Carter
#18. Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.
Angela Carter
#19. We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies-all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.
Angela Carter
#20. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he was alive from the desire of the woods.
Angela Carter
#21. She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.
Angela Carter
#22. I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.
Angela Carter
#23. Ruin had been the original blueprint and men and women had lived here only in a necessary but intermediate stage of the execution of the grand design
Angela Carter
#24. Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been
Angela Carter
#25. A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.
Angela Carter
#26. In this country you do not need to think, but only to look, and soon you think you understand everything.
Angela Carter
#27. And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.
Angela Carter
#28. The long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition.
Angela Carter
#29. The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.
Angela Carter
#30. From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.
Angela Carter
#31. Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Angela Carter
#32. The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.
Angela Carter
#33. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.
Angela Carter
#34. step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague. The
Angela Carter
#35. Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.
Angela Carter
#36. The world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world - the real world, if you like - is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structures is just as malleable.
Angela Carter
#37. Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her.
Angela Carter
#39. I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.
Angela Carter
#40. His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.
Angela Carter
#41. Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.
Angela Carter
#43. I'm sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class. Actually.
Angela Carter
#44. You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.
Angela Carter
#45. He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance.
Angela Carter
#46. Abandoned lovers were often lured into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city
Angela Carter
#47. Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.
Angela Carter
#48. 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.
Angela Carter
#49. And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.
Angela Carter
#50. Old wives' tales - that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.
Angela Carter
#51. It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.
Angela Carter
#52. The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.
Angela Carter
#53. As if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.
Angela Carter
#54. I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: "What is the most miraculous event in the world?" And I answer myself: "I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.
Angela Carter
#55. My fays shall lullaby you as we cuddle up on my mattress of dandelion down.
Angela Carter
#56. She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.
Angela Carter
#57. I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking.
Angela Carter
#58. We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
Angela Carter
#59. Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.
Angela Carter
#60. Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.
Angela Carter
#63. Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy fluxitself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things.
Angela Carter
#64. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking.
Angela Carter
#66. In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
Angela Carter
#67. My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.
Angela Carter
#68. Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does.
Angela Carter
#69. At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.
Angela Carter
#70. I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.
Angela Carter
#71. Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.
Angela Carter
#72. This is some kind of heretical, possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Roscicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie!
Angela Carter
#73. He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.
Angela Carter
#74. The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing.
Angela Carter
#75. A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.
Angela Carter
#76. [ ... ] he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason.
Angela Carter
#77. Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.
Angela Carter
#78. I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.
Angela Carter
#79. If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Angela Carter
#80. Sometimes it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones gave to his face the aspect of a mask.
Angela Carter
#82. I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.
Angela Carter
#83. Her face. And she smiling. For a moment, just that moment, you would have thought it was May morning.
Angela Carter
#84. Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Angela Carter
#85. The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they're likely to have amongst themselves too keep them all in order
Angela Carter
#86. What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?
Angela Carter
#87. Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.
Angela Carter
#88. I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I ... I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?
Angela Carter
#89. Though I still turn up my coat-collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally isn't it? Everything else is artful.
Angela Carter
#90. In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.
Angela Carter
#91. It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.
Angela Carter
#92. Degredation is the subtlest drug, the most insinuating. But they could do nothing to me I had not already imagined.
Angela Carter
#93. Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers ... Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
Angela Carter
#94. 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.
Angela Carter
#95. How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.
Angela Carter
#96. On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head.
Angela Carter
#97. Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
Angela Carter
#98. The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
Angela Carter
#100. A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.
Angela Carter
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
