Angela Carter Quotes (55 Quotes)


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

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

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

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

    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.


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

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

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

    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.

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

    Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

    What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?

    Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.

    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 biographiesall the bits and pieces of our unique existences.

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

    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.

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

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

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

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

    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.

    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.


    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.

    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.

    Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value there is no other.

    They danced the dance of the outcasts for the outcasts who watched them, amid the louring trees, with a blizzard coming on.

    The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder.

    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.

    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.

    This dance was the dance of death. The clowns danced it for the wretched of the earth, that they might witness their own wretchedness.


    Dinner was awesome. Mr. Rings can cook. And the kids did great serving.

    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.

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

    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.

    You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.

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

    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.

    I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

    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.

    Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

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

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

    Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

    I see this every day. If it's not a hand-out, if it's not free, if it requires a little work, they don't care for it.

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

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

    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.

    It's useful when a problem comes up that you have no experience of. You then have somebody you can refer to, ... The workplace would be a far nicer place if people said 'thank you' a bit more often.


    More Angela Carter Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Death & Dying - World - Books - Place - Life - Woman - Movies - Power - Education - Age - Passion - Nostalgia - Dreams - Dancing - Art - Angels - Language - Acting - View All Angela Carter Quotations

    Related Authors


    V. S. Naipaul - Thomas Hardy - Robertson Davies - Pearl S. Buck - P. D. James - Mario Puzo - Louisa May Alcott - Fyodor Dostoevsky - Arthur Herzog - Aldous Huxley


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