Angela Carter Quotes

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

I desire therefore I exist.

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.

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

This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end of exile is the end of being.

ordered me a sky from a florist

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

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

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

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

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

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

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.

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.

[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.

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

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

His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.

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

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

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

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.

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.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

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

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.

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

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye...

It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one.

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.

How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.