Top 100 Quotes About Angela Carter
#1. Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.
Jeff VanderMeer
#2. Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
Jeff VanderMeer
#3. Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.
Angela Carter
#4. 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
#5. The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind only if he arrives there in full possession of his partial faculties
that is, providing he is perfectly aware of the precise nature of sight and does not confuse it with second sightnor with madness.
Angela Carter
#6. A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
Angela Carter
#7. Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Angela Carter
#8. 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
#9. The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.
Angela Carter
#10. Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning.
Angela Carter
#11. Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.
Angela Carter
#12. The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.
Angela Carter
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right.
Angela Carter
#17. Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.
Angela Carter
#18. Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.
Angela Carter
#19. In this country you do not need to think, but only to look, and soon you think you understand everything.
Angela Carter
#20. A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.
Angela Carter
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.
Angela Carter
#24. 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
#25. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he was alive from the desire of the woods.
Angela Carter
#26. Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
Angela Carter
#27. Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
Angela Carter
#28. The enchantment of that bright, sad, pretty place enveloped her and she found that, against all her expectations, she was happy there.
Angela Carter
#29. Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation.
Angela Carter
#31. Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.
Angela Carter
#32. Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.
Angela Carter
#33. There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.
Angela Carter
#34. His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.
Angela Carter
#35. 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
#37. Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her.
Angela Carter
#38. 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
#39. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched
Angela Carter
#40. Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology.
Angela Carter
#41. There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.
Angela Carter
#43. The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
Angela Carter
#44. It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all. I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel.
Angela Carter
#45. Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.
Angela Carter
#46. Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
Angela Carter
#47. 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
#48. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.
Angela Carter
#49. The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.
Angela Carter
#50. In his diabolic solitude, only the possibility of love could awake the libertine to perfect, immaculate terror. It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women.
Angela Carter
#51. Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.
Angela Carter
#52. At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.
Angela Carter
#54. The lilies i always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.
Angela Carter
#55. It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.
Angela Carter
#56. Man does and is dressed to do so, his skin is his own business. He is artful, the creation of culture. Woman is; and is, therefore, fully dressed in no clothes at all, her skin is common property.
Angela Carter
#57. I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.
Angela Carter
#58. This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.
Angela Carter
#59. 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
#60. What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
Angela Carter
#61. As for my father, few souls are less troubled. He can be simply pleased with us, pleased that we exist, and, from the vantage point of his wondrously serene old age, he contemplates our lives almost as if they were books he can dip into whenever he wants. His back pages, perhaps.
Angela Carter
#62. For nothing is more boring than being forced to play.
Angela Carter
#63. There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.
Angela Carter
#64. Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge ... The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.
Angela Carter
#65. I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.
Angela Carter
#66. The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
Angela Carter
#67. His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
Angela Carter
#68. They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, gray members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long wavering howl ... an aria of fear made audible.
The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.
Angela Carter
#69. 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
#70. It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven't got a family of their own, they will invent one.
Angela Carter
#71. [T]ea, that uniquely English meal, that unnecessary collation at which no stimulants
neither alcohol nor meat
are served, that comforting repast of which to partake is as good as second childhood.
Angela Carter
#72. She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.
Angela Carter
#73. 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
#74. Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit.
Angela Carter
#75. Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?
Angela Carter
#76. 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
#77. Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.
Angela Carter
#78. Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
Angela Carter
#79. Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it!
Angela Carter
#80. It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.
Angela Carter
#81. They say there's an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on.
Angela Carter
#82. A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.
Angela Carter
#83. Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.
Angela Carter
#84. When the sun goes down, it is very cold and then I easily start crying because the winter moon pierces my heart
The Smile of Winter
Angela Carter
#85. 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
#86. We must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
Angela Carter
#87. She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.
Angela Carter
#88. 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
#90. It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.
Angela Carter
#91. 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
#92. Ironing's nice and simple,' he said. 'I get all tangled up in words when I'm putting together those interminable papers ...
Angela Carter
#93. When I'd first loved him, I wanted to take him apart, as a child dismembers a clockwork toy, to comprehend the inscrutable mechanics of its interior.
-flesh and the mirror
Angela Carter
#94. I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.
Angela Carter
#95. I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.
Angela Carter
#96. Sometimes he lays his head on my lap and lets me comb his lovely hair for him; his combings are leaves of every tree in the wood and dryly susurrate around my feet.
Angela Carter
#97. Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Angela Carter
#98. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition.
Angela Carter
#99. The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
Angela Carter
#100. I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it.
Angela Carter
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