Angela Carter > Quotes

“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

“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

“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 and Other Stories

“The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.”
― Angela Carter

“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”
― Angela Carter

“The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“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, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“I desire therefore I exist.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“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

“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“Hope for the best, expect the worst.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“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

“I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“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 and Other Stories

“If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women 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.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.”
― Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

“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 and Other Stories

“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: Collected Short Stories

“Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“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

“Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.”
― Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”
― Angela Carter

“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: Collected Short Stories

“The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“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

“I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I...I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”
― Angela Carter

“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.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus