Angela Carter Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. 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
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
The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.

Angela Carter
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
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

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

Angela Carter
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.

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

Angela Carter
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
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.

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

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

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

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

Angela Carter
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.

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

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

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

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

Angela Carter
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.

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

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

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

Angela Carter
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