Famous Quotes & Sayings

Angela Carter Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Angela Carter.

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Famous Quotes By Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1345998

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

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The long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition. — Angela Carter

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Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment. — 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!
AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh.
MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow.
AMBASSADOR: 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

Angela Carter Quotes 1055297

In their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 946848

There's a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon trees grow. We come from countries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think you've come to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South infects the starved brain; it gasps: 'Luxury! more luxury!' But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flocking against the windowpanes to mock my father's expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devil's picture books. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 2271205

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

Angela Carter Quotes 1405595

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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Sometimes it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones gave to his face the aspect of a mask. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 724217

She walked in technicolor. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1069251

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1447868

Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology. — 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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The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1046204

In his diabolic solitude, only the possibility of love could awake the libertine to perfect, immaculate terror. It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 487955

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 301294

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

Angela Carter Quotes 895275

Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 2173236

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

Angela Carter Quotes 1078564

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre
the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1705430

(And could love free me from the shadows? Can a caged bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?) — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1767956

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

Angela Carter Quotes 1648695

Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it! — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1774985

There are limits to the power of laughter and though I may hint at them from time to time, I do not propose to step over them. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1294474

The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind only if he arrives there in full possession of his partial faculties
that is, providing he is perfectly aware of the precise nature of sight and does not confuse it with second sightnor with madness. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1811000

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

Angela Carter Quotes 1616131

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

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

Angela Carter Quotes 1560110

She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. — Angela Carter

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Destruction is only another aspect of being. — Angela Carter

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

Angela Carter Quotes 1490234

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

Angela Carter Quotes 1487872

Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy fluxitself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things. — Angela Carter

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The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1919018

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

Angela Carter Quotes 2149738

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

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The lilies i always associate with him; that are white. And stain you. — Angela Carter

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I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it. — Angela Carter

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F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel
for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions
did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 2065904

Abandoned lovers were often lured into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 2050955

But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practise such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else's house as you passed by the window. — Angela Carter

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What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 2011324

Though I still turn up my coat-collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally isn't it? Everything else is artful. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 2001168

She had given herself to the world in her entirety and then found nothing was left — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1980465

For nothing is more boring than being forced to play. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1813619

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

Angela Carter Quotes 1914266

I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1911902

She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1909902

This clockwork twin of mine halted before me, her bowels churning out a settecento minuet, and offered me the bold carnation of her smile. Click, click
she raises her arm and busily dusts my cheeks with pink, powdered chalk that makes me cough; then thrusts towards me her little mirror. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 2176023

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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At the best of times, spring hurts depressives. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1869847

Old wives' tales - that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1853187

Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you must have gathered, is the smile I wear. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1837193

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

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Below me, in spreading, concentric circles, like those a fish makes when it rises in still water, spun round the lower tiers; above me arched the black sky pierced by the gas jets of the stars. — Angela Carter

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I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 515407

It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 683872

Morris wondered what domestic catastrophe would make a man sell even the plaster gnomes from his garden.It was a horrid piece of evidence for mutability; Mutability, goddess of the auction room, dusty-fingered Mutability, the old-age pensioner goddess. And she ruled over the casserole containing the half-empty packet of sugar no one would ever finish, now; and the dropsical white tea-pot with the brown tidemark left in by years of the-making by dead women in flowered aprons ( withered and dead, all the chintz flowers); over all the odd, disjointed fragments of other people's lives. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 646758

And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, orange of tiger-lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from a florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream. — Angela Carter

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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

Angela Carter Quotes 633101

The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 626854

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

Angela Carter Quotes 614840

I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: "What is the most miraculous event in the world?" And I answer myself: "I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 596442

The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they're likely to have amongst themselves too keep them all in order — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 565661

These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye... — Angela Carter

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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. — Angela Carter

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Finn is Daddy,' said Victoria with fat satisfaction.
'Not yet,' said Finn. 'But we'll christen the first one Proximity.'
Melanie choked on a mouthful. — Angela Carter

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I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father's farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass. — Angela Carter

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His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 401431

He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 385408

As if your essence were hung up in a closet like a dress too good to be worn and you were reduced to going out in only your appearance. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 346308

The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point. These and teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.
The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the rooms four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pungent fumes of incense. In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks. In a white lace negligee stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 321175

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

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The world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world - the real world, if you like - is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structures is just as malleable. — Angela Carter

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See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf. — Angela Carter

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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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There are some eyes that can eat you. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 110823

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time. — Angela Carter

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One beast and only one howls in the woods by night. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1299721

step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague. The — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1297295

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 94770

[T]ea, that uniquely English meal, that unnecessary collation at which no stimulants
neither alcohol nor meat
are served, that comforting repast of which to partake is as good as second childhood. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1284895

He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive. — Angela Carter

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How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1230412

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. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1194438

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1158384

My fays shall lullaby you as we cuddle up on my mattress of dandelion down. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1051447

I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1032116

Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I wil become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty. — Angela Carter

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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

Angela Carter Quotes 1004621

It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven't got a family of their own, they will invent one. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 1003752

Ironing's nice and simple,' he said. 'I get all tangled up in words when I'm putting together those interminable papers ... — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 982959

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

Angela Carter Quotes 960482

Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like a scimitar he held. The picture had a caption 'Reproof of curiosity. — Angela Carter

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Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness. — Angela Carter

Angela Carter Quotes 773355

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

Angela Carter Quotes 765047

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

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The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break. — Angela Carter