Angela Carter Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

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

Angela Carter
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.

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

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

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

Angela Carter
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.

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

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

Angela Carter
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.

Angela Carter
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.

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

Angela Carter
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.

Angela Carter
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.

Angela Carter
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.

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

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

Angela Carter
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

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

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

Angela Carter
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
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.

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

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

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

Angela Carter
Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it.

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

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

Angela Carter