Angela Carter Quotes

The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like...

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a...

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

jThe notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universa...

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

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

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

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

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a noth...

Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like ...

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

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — h...

Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place...

Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will a...

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your...

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the ...

To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the...

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she ...

Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodolog...

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases t...

The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually i...

Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is t...

Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a w...

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himse...

I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must know I was suffering from love and I k...

What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the...

She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her qu...

By the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she alm...

At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.

Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited l...

They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When the...

She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he...

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming ...

Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? N...

And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.

Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!

...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.

And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.

From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar l...

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

Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack...

She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment...

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

She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.

Despair is the constant companion of the clown.

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

And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on t...

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had b...

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

She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and rut...

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sigh...

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high...

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

I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all ...

My father lost me to the Beast at cards

What big eyes you have. Eyes of an incomparable luminosity, the numinous phosphorescence of the eyes...

MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced ...

She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occas...

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and ...

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer ...

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

She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...

A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.

Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been p...

The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire...

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.To exist in the passive case is to d...

She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a tr...

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who ca...

...as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself,...

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

...a great future behind him, already

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.