74 Quotes & Sayings By Angela Carter

Angela Carter was born in Sussex, England, on July 28, 1940. She was educated at homeschooling schools in Switzerland and France. She studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she was awarded a first-class degree in 1961. From 1962-64 she worked as a lecturer in English at St Anne's College Read more

She also held several short-term teaching posts in the U.S. Her first novel, The Magic Toyshop (1967), brought her widespread critical acclaim and won the Somerset Maugham Award for best first novel of 1967...more

I think I want to be in love with you...
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I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how. Angela Carter
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Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: "It can't last." She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense. Angela Carter
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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. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking. Angela Carter
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To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm? . Angela Carter
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You...
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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. Angela Carter
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She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movement under her eyelids, and the somnolent gestures of her hands and feet, it seems as if her dreams grow more urgent and intense, as if the life she lives in the closed world of dreams is now about to possess her utterly, as if her small, increasingly reluctant wakenings were an interpretation of some more vital existence, so she is loath to spend even those necessary moments of wakefulness with us, wakings strange as her sleepings. Her marvellous fate - a sleep more lifelike than the living, a dream which consumes the world.' And, sir, ' concluded Fevvers, in a voice that now took on the sombre, majestic tones of a great organ, 'we do believe . . her dream will be the coming century.' And, oh, God . how frequently she weeps! . Angela Carter
The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh....
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The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children. Angela Carter
These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the...
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These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye... Angela Carter
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Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable." And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: "THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS. Angela Carter
Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is...
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Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different! Angela Carter
Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning...
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Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women. Angela Carter
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We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity. Angela Carter
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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
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It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one. Angela Carter
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They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of pleasures but, connoisseurs of unreality as they were, they could not bear the crude weight, the rank smell and the ripe taste of real flesh. It is always a dangerous experiment to act out a fantasy; they had undertaken the experiment rashly and had failed… . Angela Carter
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The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. Angela Carter
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Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality. Angela Carter
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At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there. Angela Carter
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There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock. Angela Carter
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How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart. Angela Carter
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I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason. Angela Carter
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A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Angela Carter
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...a great future behind him, already Angela Carter
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At the best of times, spring hurts depressives. Angela Carter
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Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden. Angela Carter
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The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden. Angela Carter
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By the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good. Angela Carter
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She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves. Angela Carter
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She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked after the poor and laid their tender napes beneath a husband’s booted foot, and even if he brought home cabfuls of half-naked chorus girls and had them dance on the rich round mahogany dining-table (rosily reflecting great pearly hams and bums in its polished depths). Or, drunk to a frenzy, raped the kitchen-maid before the morning assembly of servants and children and her black silk-dressed self (gathered for prayers). Or forced her to stitch, on shirts, her fingers to rags to pay his gambling debts. Husbands were a force of nature or an act of God; like an earthquake or the dreaded consumption, to be borne with, to be meekly acquiesced to, to be impregnated by as frequently as Nature would allow. It took the mindless persistence, the dogged imbecility of the grey tides, to love a husband. Angela Carter
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She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking. Angela Carter
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Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time--it is the clue, like Ariadne's, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music. Angela Carter
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Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue. Angela Carter
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And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat. Angela Carter
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She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: WHEN YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT. Angela Carter
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MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub! A M B A S S A D O R: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh. M I N I S T E R: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow. A M B A S S A D O R: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me, I palpitate!. Angela Carter
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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
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Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation. Angela Carter
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It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics. Angela Carter
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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
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Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people. Angela Carter
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Despair is the constant companion of the clown. Angela Carter
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A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast. Angela Carter
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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
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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
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She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky... Angela Carter
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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
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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
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And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape. Angela Carter
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology. Angela Carter
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She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds. Angela Carter
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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
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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
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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
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...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
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Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment! Angela Carter
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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
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A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar. Angela Carter
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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
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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
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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
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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
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My father lost me to the Beast at cards Angela Carter
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The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh? Angela Carter
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...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play. Angela Carter
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Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual. Angela Carter
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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
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Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death. Angela Carter
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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
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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