110+ Angela Carter Quotes On Feminism, Fantasy

Angela Carter was an English novelist, short story writer and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is best known for her book The Bloody Chamber, which is a collection of darkly sensual re-tellings of classic fairy tales. Carter wrote many other books, including The Magic Toyshop, Nights at the Circus, and Wise Children. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Angela Carter on feminism, fantasy, feminism.

Top 10 Angela Carter Quotes

1. 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.
2. In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.
3. Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.
4. I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
5. I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.
6. If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
7. 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.
8. We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
9. His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
• The kind of power mothers have is enormous.
• She stood lost in eternity wearing a crazy dress, watching the immense sky.
• Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.
• A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
• A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.
• Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.
• Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.
• Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.
• Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

Angela Carter Quotes About World

Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody. — Angela Carter

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world. — Angela Carter

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur. — Angela Carter

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day. — Angela Carter

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force — Angela Carter

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

The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder. — Angela Carter

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

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

Angela Carter Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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 Famous Quotes And Sayings

I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day. — Angela Carter

You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself. — Angela Carter

I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous. — 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. from "The Lady of the Haunted House — Angela Carter

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence. — 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

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine. — Angela Carter

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason. — Angela Carter

The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation. — Angela Carter

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off. — Angela Carter

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe. — 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

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with. — Angela Carter

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world. — Angela Carter

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect. — Angela Carter

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

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

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

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time. — Angela Carter

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

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. — Angela Carter

Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production. — Angela Carter

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

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

Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through. — 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

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

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. — Angela Carter

Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle. — Angela Carter

All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad. — Angela Carter

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

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

Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. — Angela Carter

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

Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman. — Angela Carter

Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed. — Angela Carter

A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy. — Angela Carter

And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses.... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread. — Angela Carter

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

How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic? — Angela Carter

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh? — Angela Carter

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I was born. In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it. — 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

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

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

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment. — Angela Carter

Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation. — Angela Carter

[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

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

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

The end of exile is the end of being. — Angela Carter

Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined. — Angela Carter

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe. — Angela Carter

Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast. — Angela Carter

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

One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities. — Angela Carter

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

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

We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies -- all the bits and pieces of our unique existences. — Angela Carter

I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with itshard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it--the Bovary syndrome. — Angela Carter

Iconic clothing has been secularized. A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative color and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent. — 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

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

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

I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me. — Angela Carter

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language. — Angela Carter

The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing. — Angela Carter

A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems. — Angela Carter

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

Among the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest? — Angela Carter

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast. — Angela Carter

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. — Angela Carter

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody. — Angela Carter

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. — Angela Carter

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure. — Angela Carter

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

Life Lessons by Angela Carter

1. Angela Carter teaches us to be brave and take risks in life, as she did when she chose to write stories that were unconventional and often controversial.
2. She also encourages us to be creative and think outside the box, as she was known for her unique and imaginative writing style.
3. Lastly, she shows us to be resilient and never give up, as she persevered through difficult times and achieved success and recognition for her work.