Angela Carter Quotes

Angela Olive Carter-Pearce , known professionally as Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

✵ 7. May 1940 – 16. February 1992  •  Other names Анджела Картър, ਐਂਜੇਲਾ ਕਾਰਟਰ

Works

Wise Children

Wise Children

Angela Carter

Nights at the Circus

Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Angela Carter

Wise Children

Wise Children

Angela Carter

Nights at the Circus

Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Angela Carter

Angela Carter: 43 quotes2 likes

Famous 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.”

“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!”

Angela Carter book Nights at the Circus

Source: Nights at the Circus

“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

Angela Carter book Wise Children

Source: Wise Children (1991), ch. 5 (p.213).

“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.”

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other 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 book Wise Children

Source: Wise Children

Angela Carter Quotes about love

“We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.”

Angela Carter book Nights at the Circus

Source: Nights at the Circus

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

Source: Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

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

Angela Carter The Magic Toyshop

Source: The Magic Toyshop

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

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

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

Angela Carter book Wise Children

Source: Wise Children

“Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.”

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Angela Carter Quotes about the world

“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.”

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

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

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

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Angela Carter Quotes

“I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.”

Interview http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/85_01_20.pdf in Marxism Today, January 1985. <br class="br">Context: I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

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

Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992).

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

Angela Carter book Nights at the Circus

Source: Nights at the Circus

“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.”

Angela Carter book The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Source: 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.”

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

Angela Carter book The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Source: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.”

Source: 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 book Wise Children

Source: Wise Children

“Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

Angela Carter book Wise Children

Source: Wise Children

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

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“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.”

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“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.”

Source: Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

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

Source: Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

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

Angela Carter book Wise Children

Source: Wise Children

“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.”

Source: Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories

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

Angela Carter book The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Source: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

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

Angela Carter book Nights at the Circus

Source: Nights at the Circus

“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.”

Source: The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

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

Angela Carter The Magic Toyshop

Source: The Magic Toyshop

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

Angela Carter The Passion of New Eve

Source: The Passion of New Eve

“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.”

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

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

Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992).

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

The Bridled Sweeties (1977).

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

Response to a student's question in her writing class, as quoted by Louis Menand in the New Yorker (June 8-15, 2009), p. 112.

“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.”

The Kitchen Child (1976).

“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.”

Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings (1998).

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