"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

"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

"The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocial. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers."
— Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories)

"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" "
— Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber)

"The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown."
— Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus)

"With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton."
— Angela Carter (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman)

"His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanesecence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intagible relfections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.
"
— Angela Carter (Burning Your Boats)

"We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity."
— Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus)

"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

"So I suppose I do not know how he really looked, and, in fact, I suppose I shall never know, now, for he was plainly an object created in the mode of fantasy. His image was already present somewhere in my head and I was seeking to discover it in actuality, looking at every face I met in case it was the right face - that is, the face which corresponded to my notion of the unseen face of the one I should love, a face created parthenogeneticallyby the rage to love which consumed me."
— Angela Carter (Burning Your Boats)

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.... you bring to a novel, anything you read, alll your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms "
— 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

"They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night."
— Angela Carter (Burning Your Boats)

"The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world"
— Angela Carter

""They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, gray members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long wavering howl . . . an aria of fear made audible.
The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.""
— Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber)

"we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms."
— Angela Carter (Passion of New Eve)

"Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation."
— Angela Carter (Heroes and Villains)

""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.""
— Angela Carter

"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 (Nights at the Circus)

"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 (The Bloody Chamber)

"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

"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

"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

"You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness
with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish."
— Angela Carter (Passion of New Eve)

"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 (Nights at the Circus)

"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 (Wayward Girls and Wicked Women)

"all white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched"
— Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus)

"ruin had been the original blueprint and men and women had lived here only in a necessary but intermediate stage of the execution of the grand design"
— Angela Carter (Heroes and Villains)

"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

"Reading a book is like rewriting 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