Angela Carter Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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.

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

Angela Carter
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.

Angela Carter
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.

Angela Carter
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.

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

Angela Carter
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.

Angela Carter
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
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.

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

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

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

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

Angela Carter
Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.

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

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

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

Angela Carter
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
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.

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

Angela Carter