Angela Carter Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

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

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

Angela Carter
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.

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

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

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
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.

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

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

Angela Carter
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
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
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.

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

Angela Carter
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.

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

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

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

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

Angela Carter