Angela Carter Quotes

I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must know 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.

~ Angela Carter

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

~ Angela Carter

Despair is the constant companion of the clown.

~ Angela Carter

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

~ Angela Carter

Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.

~ 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

She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...

~ 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

What big eyes you have. Eyes of an incomparable luminosity, the numinous phosphorescence of the eyes of lycanthropes. The gelid green of your eyes fixes my reflective face; It is a preservative, like a green liquid amber; it catches me. I am afraid I will be trapped in it for ever like the poor little ants and flies that stuck their feet in resin before the sea covered the Baltic. He winds me into the circle of his eye on a reel of birdsong. There is a black hole in the middle of both your eyes; it is their still centre, looking there makes me giddy, as if I might fall into it.

~ Angela Carter

And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.

~ 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

She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her queen and she hit me.”Though, he recalled, not sufficiently brutally to require that he tie her wrists together with his belt, force her to kneel and beat her until she toppled over sideways. She raised a strangely joyous face to him; the pallor of her skin and the almost miraculous lustre of her eyes startled and even awed him.

~ Angela Carter

jThe 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

The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.

~ Angela Carter

Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology.

~ Angela Carter

She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.

~ Angela Carter

Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit.’ Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’ She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.

~ Angela Carter

Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season.

~ Angela Carter

She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.

~ Angela Carter

...as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.

~ Angela Carter

Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!

~ 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

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.

~ Angela Carter

What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the truth?'She nodded.'The firing squad.''That's not the whole truth. Try again.''Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness.'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.'He was silent for several minutes.'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.''Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?

~ 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

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.

~ Angela Carter

My father lost me to the Beast at cards

~ Angela Carter

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

~ Angela Carter

...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.

~ Angela Carter

From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.

~ Angela Carter

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

~ 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

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