Angela Carter Quotes:

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

source: - Angela Carter (2012). “Wise Children”, p.10, Random House

Topics: Memories, Vices, Watches, Monochrome

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Topics: 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.

Topics: Book, Reading, Writing, Inspiring Reading, Book Reading

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.

Topics: White, Rose, Moonlight, Satin

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.

Topics: Mother, Father, Real, Gods And Goddesses

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.

Topics: Sweet, Heart, Night, Goblin, Mattresses

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

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings”, Vintage

Topics: Book, Writing, What Matters, Containers

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

source: - Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Culture, Language, Instruments, Language Culture, Power Of Language

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

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings”, Vintage

Topics: Sex, New York, Men, City Of London, Transsexuals

She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...

Topics: 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.

source: - "The Company of Angela Carter". "Marxism Today" Magazine, January 1985.

Topics: Angel, Thinking, Culture, Primates

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings”, Vintage

Topics: Eggs, Salt, Argument

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

Topics: Laughter, Children, Laughing

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

Topics: Humanity, Rags, Scarecrow, Flapping

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.

Topics: Flesh, Taste, Carnivores

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

Topics: Reality, Reason, Overdose

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

source: - Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

Topics: 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.

Topics: Sunshine, California, Contracts

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.

Topics: Literature, Pins, Hypothesis

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

Topics: 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

Topics: Taken, World, Commodity

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

Topics: Life And Death, Literature, Matter

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

Topics: People, Tragedy, Literature, Tragedy And Comedy

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

Topics: Years, Hours, Mets

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

Topics: Dream, Hollywood, United States, Mass Production

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Love Is, Desire

The end of exile is the end of being.

Topics: 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.

Topics: White, Promise, Faces

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

Topics: Two, Rubies, Inches, Chokers

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

Topics: Mean, Feminism, Skins

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

Topics: Respect, Mean, Missing, Nudge, Winking

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.

Topics: 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

Topics: Mother, Revenge, Istanbul, Skylines

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

Topics: Grandmother, People, Posing

Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.

Topics: Men, Space

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

Topics: Able, Barbarians, Blame

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

Topics: Order, Miracle, Age

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

Topics: Mother, Father, Facts

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

Topics: Passion

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.

Topics: Vices, Nostalgia

A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.

Topics: Heart, Broken, Tragedy, Untimely Death

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

Topics: Fun, Book, Mean, Modernity, Post Modernism

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

Topics: Sleep, Bed, Tables, Dinner Table

At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.

Topics: Hurt, Spring

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

source: - Internationale Situationist (Paris), No. 1, June 1958.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Jobs, Real, Nurse, Real World

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Artist, Self, Mad, Generalities

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Mother, War, Doctors, Magic Realism

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.

Topics: Father, Ruins, Aeneas

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Historical, Enemy, Doe, Possibility Of Change

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.

Topics: Eye, Men, Blood, Innocent Eyes, Braids

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.

Topics: Life, Unique, Emotional, Bits And Pieces, Social Class

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.

Topics: Life, Art, Mean, Fine Arts, Irresponsibility

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.

Topics: Clever, Female, Tricks, Universality

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.

Topics: Lovely, Mind, Tragedy, Impersonators

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.

Topics: Dream, Dark, Greek, Participating, Unison

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.

source: - Source: www.rogerebert.com

Topics: 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.

Topics: Revenge, Thinking, Language

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

Topics: Monsters, Looks, Forests

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

Topics: Laughing, May, Mirth

Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

Topics: World, Fool, Illusion

There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Acts Of Love, Chamber, Resemblance

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

Topics: Shadow, Universe

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

Topics: Past, House, Different

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — 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.

source: - Angela Carter (2015). “Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales”, p.10, Hachette UK

Topics: Men, Our World, Imagination, Oral Tradition

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Girl, Light, House, Granny, Red Riding Hood

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Anticipation, Pleasure, Greater

She stood lost in eternity wearing a crazy dress, watching the immense sky.

source: - "The Magic Toyshop".

Topics: Sky, Eternity, Lost

And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses.... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread.

source: - Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

Topics: Mother, Class, Wife, Misspent Youth, Wives And Mothers

Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.

source: - Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Home, Heart, Home Is Where The Heart Is

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been.

source: - Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

Topics: Death, Time, Fiction

I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings”, Vintage

Topics: Lonely, Writing, Thinking, Megalomania

I desire therefore I exist.

Topics: Desire

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?

Topics: Men, Two, Giving, Riding A Bicycle

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. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

Topics: Eye, House, Doe, Haunted Houses

Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!

source: - Angela Carter (1984). “Nights at the circus”, Vintage

Topics: Men, Fire, Different, What Is Marriage, Frying Pans

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.

source: - Angela Carter (1984). “Nights at the circus”, Vintage

Topics: Parent, Anxiety, Soul, Compatible

...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.

source: - Angela Carter (1984). “Nights at the circus”, Vintage

Topics: Years, Long, One Day, Thousand Years, Shaking

He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.

source: - Angela Carter (2012). “Wise Children”, p.123, Random House

Topics: Men, Lovely, Forgiving, Lovely Man

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Running, Lying, Lambs

What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Daughter, Philanthropy, Rich

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with

Topics: Men, Cities

How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Feelings, Doe, Conviction, Pretence

Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.

source: - Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Sexy, Fashion, Women

The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.

source: - Angela Carter (1993). “American ghosts & old world wonders”, Vintage

Topics: Country, Brave New World, Invisible

Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I wil become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty.

Topics: Eye, Loss, Reflection, Whirlpools, Diminish

Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.

source: - Angela Carter (2015). “The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History”, p.77, Hachette UK

Topics: Share, Reciprocity, Sensations

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Long, Suffering, Shadow, Wraith, Aria

I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with itshard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it--the Bovary syndrome.

source: - Angela Carter (2016). “Fireworks”, p.54, Random House

Topics: Reality, Echoes, Light

For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains

Topics: Fun, Cat, Thinking, Mona Lisa

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

source: - Angela Carter (2015). “The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History”, p.7, Hachette UK

Topics: Relationship, Women, Schemas

Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Brother, Voice, Darling

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

Topics: Desire, Shapes, Kaleidoscope, Marvellous

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.

Topics: Girl, Eye, Moon, Brown Eyes

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

Topics: Hoping For The Best, Worst

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.

source: - Angela Carter (2012). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, p.22, Random House

Topics: Reading, Offending, Dubious

One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Night, Woods, Beast

This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Hero, Giving, Imagination

I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.

Topics: Love You, Thinking, Want

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.

Topics: Flower, Heart, Tissue Paper

His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.

Topics: Principles, Imagine

[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.

source: - Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

Topics: Childhood, Alcohol, Comforting, Stimulants

Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation.

source: - Angela Carter (2011). “Heroes and Villains”, p.243, Penguin UK

Topics: Names, Losing, Process

The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing.

source: - "The stories of our lives" by Carmen Callil, www.theguardian.com. April 25, 2008.

Topics: Iron, Sheets, Deadline

I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father's farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Father, Farewell, Glasses, Broken Glass

It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.

source: - Angela Carter (2015). “Angela Carter's Book Of Wayward Girls And Wicked Women”, p.6, Hachette UK

Topics: Life, Women, Morality, Blameless

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Night, Long, Boredom

Spindly branches of buttercups were secreted among gleaming stems still moist at the roots from last night's rain that had washedand refreshed the entire wood, had dowered it in poignant transparency, the unique, inconsolable quality of rainy countries, as if all was glimpsed through tears.

source: - Angela Carter (2016). “Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories”, p.81, Random House

Topics: Country, Rain, Unique, Buttercup

Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through.

Topics: Christmas, Doors, Midnight, Solstice

Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart.

source: - Angela Carter (1987). “Saints and Strangers”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Sad, Heart, Autumn

ordered me a sky from a florist

Topics: Sky

Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.

Topics: Battle, Toenails, Habit, Fingernails

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1984). “Nights at the circus”, Vintage

Topics: Country, Kings, Men

Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been

source: - Angela Carter (2012). “Wise Children”, p.91, Random House

Topics: Stars, Eye, Doors

Irish was a man of parts even if some of them didn't work too well.

source: - Angela Carter (2012). “Wise Children”, p.122, Random House

Topics: Work, Sarcasm, Men

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

Topics: Creativity, Optimism, Rabbits

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1977). “The Passion of New Eve”, Harcourt

Topics: May, Determined, Blame

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1977). “The Passion of New Eve”, Harcourt

Topics: Long, Shadow, Emptiness, Platonic, Imaginary Things

One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.

source: - Angela Carter (1971). “Love: a novel”

Topics: Moon, Night, Sight

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Dolls, Details, Language, Undead

What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the truth?' She nodded. 'The firing squad.' 'That's not the whole truth. Try again.' 'Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness. 'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.' He was silent for several minutes. 'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.' 'Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?

Topics: Country, Simple, Squad, Burying

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Art, Real, Order, Baudelaire

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Lonely, Character, Mirrors

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.

Topics: White, Promise, Faces, Debauchery

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Beautiful, Hair, Water

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

source: - Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

Topics: Heart, Years, Adjectives, I Haven't Changed

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Running, Men, Spy

The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.

Topics: Girl, Children, Lovely

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

source: - Angela Carter (2012). “The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories”, p.6, Random House

Topics: Eye, Mirrors, Sight

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Moving, Eggs, Space, Membranes

It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

source: - "Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories".

Topics: Passion, Literature, Objects

Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.

Topics: Mother, Children, Rip, Vengeful

And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.

Topics: Useless Things, Cash, Way, Squandering

Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you must have gathered, is the smile I wear.

Topics: Beach, Loneliness, Ocean, Desolate, Winter Moon

Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.

Topics: Kissing, Blood, Degrees, Flogging

Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to reproduce, which is her pride, is, since it is beyond choice, not a specific virtue of her own.

Topics: Mother, Pride, Ideas, Embryos

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Father, Book, Soul, Vantage Point

Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty looks, pet. Come here. She did not move. He ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed. Come here, he said again, softly. So she went.

Topics: Moving, Hair, Pet, Ledges, Plaits

My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday's washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest--a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.

source: - Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Monday, Morning, Atheist, Day Of Rest

So I suppose I do not know how he really looked, and, in fact, I suppose I shall never know, now, for he was plainly an object created in the mode of fantasy. His image was already present somewhere in my head and I was seeking to discover it in actuality, looking at every face I met in case it was the right face - that is, the face which corresponded to my notion of the unseen face of the one I should love, a face created parthenogeneticallyby the rage to love which consumed me.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Unseen, Faces, Facts

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.

Topics: Awards, Purpose, Growing

I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.

source: - Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: Glasses, Should Have, Watches

His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanesecence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intagible relfections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.

Topics: Morning, Children, Moving, Morning Glory, Seeming

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.

source: - Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

Topics: Taken, Cat, Acceptance, Burroughs

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

source: - Angela Carter (1985). “Black Venus”, Random House (UK)

Topics: Country, Cutting, Hands

And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kitchen?... The scoured gleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, before which my mother bowed in perpetual homage, a fringe of sweat upon her upper lip and the fire glowing in her cheeks.

Topics: Mother, Air, Glowing, Chalice, Cheeks

With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

Topics: Girl, Wall, Flower