Top 156 Quotes & Sayings by Angela Carter

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

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.

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.

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.

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

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.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

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.

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

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

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

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

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

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

She stood lost in eternity wearing a crazy dress, watching the immense sky.

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.

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.

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.

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

Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.

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.