Angela Carter Quotes

Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

Man does and is dressed to do so, his skin is his own business. He is artful, the creation of culture. Woman is; and is, therefore, fully dressed in no clothes at all, her skin is common property. ~ Angela Carter

[ ... ] he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason. ~ Angela Carter

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

Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves. ~ 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

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

Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

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

The triumph of the will recreates, as its Utopia, the world of early childhood, and that is a world of nightmare, impotence and fear, in which the child fantasises, out of its own powerlessness, an absolute supremacy. ~ Angela Carter

Then she broke down and cried onto the flowery wrapping paper. Melanie put her arms around the poor, thin body. What is Aunt Margaret made of? Birdbones and tissue paper. spun glass and straw. ~ Angela Carter

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

Degredation is the subtlest drug, the most insinuating. But they could do nothing to me I had not already imagined. ~ Angela Carter

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure. ~ Angela Carter

If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things? ~ Angela Carter

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

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

It was a real treat when he'd read me Daisy Miller out loud. But we'd reached the point in our relationship when, in a straight choice between him and Henry James, I'd have taken Henry James any day even if Henry James were dead and not much of a one for the girls when living, either. ~ Angela Carter

Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair. ~ Angela Carter

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

There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer. ~ Angela Carter

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

A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy. ~ 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

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar. ~ Angela Carter

Spindly branches of buttercups were secreted among gleaming stems still moist at the roots from last night's rain that had washedand refreshed the entire wood, had dowered it in poignant transparency, the unique, inconsolable quality of rainy countries, as if all was glimpsed through tears. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

We keep the wolves outside by living well. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone. ~ Angela Carter

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

And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat. ~ Angela Carter

At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any other century at all, for that matter, was a rum notion. Had the global plebiscite been acted upon in a democratic manner, the twentieth century would have forthwith ceased to exist, the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned and time, by popular consent, would have stood still. ~ 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

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

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

She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

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

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

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

I'm sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class. Actually. ~ Angela Carter

He carries on his frail shoulders a weird burden of fear; he is cast in the role of the corpse-eater, the body-snatcher who invades the last privacies of the dead. He is white as leprosy, with scrabbling fingernails, and nothing deters him. If you stuff a corpse with garlic, why, he only slavers at the treat: cadavre provençale. He will use the holy cross as a scratching post and crouch above the font to thirstily lap up holy water. ~ Angela Carter

The heart's egoism sees itself suffering when it sees another suffering and so it learns sympathy, because it can put itself into another's place; then the heart comes a little way out of its egoism and tentatively encounters the world. But, before the prospect of its own suffering, the heart melts completely and retreats into egoism, again, to protect itself. ~ Angela Carter

Sometimes it seems' said Grok, 'that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks, man eating fish waiting to gobble up your being and give you another instead ... ~ Angela Carter

The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden. ~ Angela Carter

The enchantment of that bright, sad, pretty place enveloped her and she found that, against all her expectations, she was happy there. ~ 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. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed. ~ Angela Carter

And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape. ~ Angela Carter

There are some eyes that can eat you. ~ 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

But needs must when the devil drives. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

My father lost me to the Beast at cards ~ Angela Carter

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

This is some kind of heretical, possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Roscicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie! ~ Angela Carter

His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in. Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning. ~ Angela Carter

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire. ~ Angela Carter

There had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils. ~ Angela Carter

Necessary connections are fabulous beasts. ~ Angela Carter

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

Mother goddesses are just as
silly a notion as father gods.
If a revival of the myths
of these cults gives woman
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 (1940-1992) ~ Angela Carter

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been. ~ Angela Carter

That is what I'm looking forward to the most, practical learning. I want to be a registered nurse so getting to talk to people who already work in those jobs can really teach me what to expect when I get out in the real world. ~ Angela Carter

…you see everything as though your eyes are going to lapse into tears. ~ Angela Carter

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

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

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

Indeed, pornography is basically propaganda for fucking, an activity, one would have thought, that did not need much advertising in itself, because most people want to do it as soon as they know how. ~ Angela Carter

Despair is the constant companion of the clown. ~ Angela Carter

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

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 was the only man alive who knew time had begun again. ~ Angela Carter

Fevvers felt that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations n order to be a woman. She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea. ~ Angela Carter

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of. ~ Angela Carter

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation. ~ Angela Carter

Nothing exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual relationships, and the pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being and to show that the everyday meetings in the marriage bed are parodies of their own pretensions, that the freest unions may contain the seeds of the worst exploitation. ~ Angela Carter

Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you. ~ Angela Carter

Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant. ~ Angela Carter

I desire therefore I exist. ~ Angela Carter

The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather - these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper. ~ Angela Carter

It was a sensitive and musical dog. ~ Angela Carter

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt. ~ Angela Carter

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

Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real. ~ Angela Carter

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps. ~ Angela Carter