Angela Carter
27 quotes
Biography
Angela Olive Pearce, who published under the name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realist, and picaresque works. In 1984, her short story "The Company of Wolves" was adapted into a film of the same name.
"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."
"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."
"Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism."
"Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people."
"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."
"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."
"My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis."
"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."
"In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world."
"Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death."
"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."
"What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?"
"These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye..."
"Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable." And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: "THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS."
"It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one."
"At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there."
"The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden."
"Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation."
"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."
"jThe 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."
"Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology."
"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."
"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"
"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."