Angela Carter Quotes

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

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

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.

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

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

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.

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

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

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

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

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

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.

She stood lost in eternity wearing a crazy dress, watching the immense sky.

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

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

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

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

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

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.

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. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

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

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

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

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.

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.

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.

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

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.

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

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.

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

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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