Top 200 Angela Carter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

3. “Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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5. “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.”

— Angela Carter

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6. “A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.”

— Angela Carter

7. “Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.”

— Angela Carter

8. “I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

10. “Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.”

— Angela Carter

11. “A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

13. “There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”

— Angela Carter

14. “The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

19. “I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

21. “How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?”

— Angela Carter

22. “Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.”

— Angela Carter

23. “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

24. “The end of exile is the end of being.”

— Angela Carter

25. “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

26. “What a joy it is to dance and sing!”

— Angela Carter

27. “Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.”

— Angela Carter

28. “Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

30. “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

31. “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

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32. “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

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

35. “Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.”

— Angela Carter

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment’s hesitation, she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s head.”

— Angela Carter

41. “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

42. “Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.”

— Angela Carter

43. “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

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

46. “The clown may be the source of mirth, but – who shall make the clown laugh?”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

48. “The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.”

— Angela Carter

49. “I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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