Angela Carter Quotes

“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.”

“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”

“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

“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.”

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

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

“I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.”

“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”

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

“Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.”

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

“The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.”

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

“The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”

“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.”

“I desire therefore I exist.”

“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.”

“I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.”

“Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.”

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

“Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

“His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.”

“Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge… The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.”

“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.”

“I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

“The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?”

“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.”

“She stood lost in eternity… watching the immense sky…”

“For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.”

“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.”

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

“Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.”

“My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis.”

“Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it.”

“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.”