Angela Carter quotes

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.
-- Angela Carter

#Memories #Vices #Watches

What a joy it is to dance and sing!
-- Angela Carter

#Joy

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

#Book #Reading #Writing

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.
-- Angela Carter

#White #Rose #Moonlight

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
-- Angela Carter

#Mother #Father #Real

His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in. Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.
-- Angela Carter

#Sweet #Heart #Night

A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
-- Angela Carter

#Book #Writing #What Matters

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
-- Angela Carter

#Culture #Language #Instruments

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
-- Angela Carter

#Sex #New York #Men

She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...
-- Angela Carter

#Sky #Eternity #Lost

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.
-- Angela Carter

#Angel #Thinking #Culture

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.
-- Angela Carter

#Eggs #Salt #Argument

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.
-- Angela Carter

#Laughter #Children #Laughing

We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
-- Angela Carter

#Humanity #Rags #Scarecrow

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

#Flesh #Taste #Carnivores

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.
-- Angela Carter

#Reality #Reason #Overdose

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.
-- Angela Carter

#Europe #Names #Nostalgia

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.
-- Angela Carter

#Sunshine #California #Contracts

To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?
-- Angela Carter

#Men #Two #Giving

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

#Literature #Pins #Hypothesis

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.
-- Angela Carter

#Book #Reading #Writing

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force
-- Angela Carter

#Taken #World #Commodity

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.
-- Angela Carter

#Life And Death #Literature #Matter

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
-- Angela Carter

#People #Tragedy #Literature

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.
-- Angela Carter

#Years #Hours #Mets

Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
-- Angela Carter

#Dream #Hollywood #United States

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.
-- Angela Carter

#Love Is #Desire

The end of exile is the end of being.
-- Angela Carter

#Ends #Exile

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.
-- Angela Carter

#White #Promise #Faces

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
-- Angela Carter

#Two #Rubies #Inches

Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.
-- Angela Carter

#Mean #Feminism #Skins

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
-- Angela Carter

#Respect #Mean #Missing

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I was born. In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.
-- Angela Carter

#Knowledge #Trying #Answers

The kind of power mothers have is enormous. Take the skyline of Istanbul - enormous breasts, pathetic little willies, a final revenge on Islam. I was so scared I had to crouch in the bottom of the boat when I saw it
-- Angela Carter

#Mother #Revenge #Istanbul

Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.
-- Angela Carter

#Grandmother #People #Posing

Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.
-- Angela Carter

#Men #Space

If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?
-- Angela Carter

#Able #Barbarians #Blame

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
-- Angela Carter

#Order #Miracle #Age

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.
-- Angela Carter

#Mother #Father #Facts

It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.
-- Angela Carter

#Passion

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.
-- Angela Carter

#Vices #Nostalgia

A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.
-- Angela Carter

#Heart #Broken #Tragedy

I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.
-- Angela Carter

#Fun #Book #Mean

The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
-- Angela Carter

#Sleep #Bed #Tables

At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.
-- Angela Carter

#Hurt #Spring

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.
-- Angela Carter

#Art #Past #Needs

That is what I'm looking forward to the most, practical learning. I want to be a registered nurse so getting to talk to people who already work in those jobs can really teach me what to expect when I get out in the real world.
-- Angela Carter

#Jobs #Real #Nurse

I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.
-- Angela Carter

#Grandmother #Grandparent #Together

All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.
-- Angela Carter

#Artist #Self #Mad

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar
-- Angela Carter

#Kings #Stories #Sugar

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

#Mother #War #Doctors

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

#Father #Ruins

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.
-- Angela Carter

#Mother #Kind #Enormous

Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of ***** 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

#Historical #Enemy #Doe

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.
-- Angela Carter

#Eye #Men #Blood

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

#Life #Unique #Emotional

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.
-- Angela Carter

#Life #Art #Mean

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

#Clever #Female #Tricks

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

#Lovely #Mind #Tragedy

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

#Dream #Dark #Greek

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

#Needs #Brushes #About Yourself

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.
-- Angela Carter

#Revenge #Thinking #Language

Among the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?
-- Angela Carter

#Monsters #Looks #Forests

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?
-- Angela Carter

#Laughing #May #Mirth