Wise Children Quotes

“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

“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

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

“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“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, Wise Children

“Wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away, either.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“...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, Wise Children

“They look around the world and think: ‘There must be something better!’ But there isn’t. Sorry, chum. This is it. What you see is what you get. Only the here and now.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“...a great future behind him, already”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“I loved it and have always loved it best of all, the moment when the lights go down, the curtain glows, you know that something wonderful is going to happen. It doesn't matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.
To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as Uncle Perry used to say. I always preferred foreplay too.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“What joy it is to dance and sing!”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“It doesn't matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“The grandfather clock was all right until Grandma fixed it. All she did was tap it and the weights dropped off. She always had that effect on gentlemen.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“She took to children like a duck to water, enough to make you wonder why she'd not had any of her own. I asked her about that, once, years later; she said she'd never, not until she picked us up and cuddled us that very first morning, known what men were FOR. 'I'd often wondered,' she said. 'When I saw you two, the penny dropped.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“You must remember that there was a war on, when we were born. If we made her happy, then we didn't add much to the collective sum of happiness in the whole of South London. First of all, the neighbours' sons went marching off, sent to their deaths, God help them. Then the husbands, the brothers, the cousins, until, in the end, all the men went except the ones with one foot in the grave and those still in the cradle, so there was a female city, red-eyed, dressed in black, outside the door, and grandma said it then, she said it again in 1939: 'Every twenty years it's bound to happen. The old men get so they can't stand the competition and they kill off all the young men they can lay their hands on. They daren't be seen to do it themselves, that would give the game away, the mothers wouldn't stand for it, so all the men all over the world get together and make a deal: you kill off our boys and we'll kill off yours. So that's that. Soon done. Then the old men can sleep easy in their beds, again.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“Look hot, stay cool, we'd instructed one another; we'd got the stance to match the suits off pat, you stuck your hipbone forward, let your shoulders droop, put all your weight on the one leg.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“What a joy it is to dance and sing!”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“The carnival's got to stop, some time.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“Life's a carnival.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“But there wasn't the merest whiff about of the kind of magic that comes when the theatre darkens, the bottom of the curtain glows, the punters settle down, you take a deep breath... none of the person-to-person magic we put together with spit and glue and willpower.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“[...] certo, una madre è sempre una madre, perché è un fatto biologico, mentre un padre è una festa mobile.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“La commedia è una tragedia che capita agli altri.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“Sorridi in pubblico, piangi in pubblico, vivi in pubblico, crepa in pubblico. C'era, sui loro visi, un'emozione schietta, atipica per gli attori. Stasera erano al telegiornale. E' la cosa peggiore veder soffrire i propri figli.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children