Top 200 Angela Carter Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

— Angela Carter

52. “The kind of power mothers have is enormous. Take the skyline of Istanbul – enormous breasts, pathetic little willies, a final revenge on Islam. I was so scared I had to crouch in the bottom of the boat when I saw it.”

— Angela Carter

53. “I am the lady of the castle. My name is exile. My name is anguish. My name is longing. Far from the world on the windy crests of the mountain, I am kept in absolute seclusion, my time passes in an endless reverie, a perpetual swooning. I am both the Sleeping Beauty and the enchanted castle; the princess drowses in the castle of her flesh.”

— Angela Carter

54. “I desire therefore I exist.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

56. “Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.”

— Angela Carter

57. “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.”

— Angela Carter

58. “We keep the wolves outside by living well.”

— Angela Carter

59. “Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

61. “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.”

— Angela Carter

62. “I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it.”

— Angela Carter

63. “You must not think my father valued me at less than a king’s ransom; but, at no more than a king’s ransom.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

65. “What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

67. “Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.”

— Angela Carter

68. “She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.”

— Angela Carter

69. “I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

— Angela Carter

70. “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.”

— Angela Carter

71. “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.”

— Angela Carter

72. “I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them.”

— Angela Carter

73. “Most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

78. “Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.”

— Angela Carter

79. “If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us – mounts and riders, both – could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars thumble out.”

— Angela Carter

80. “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.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

82. “Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning.”

— Angela Carter

83. “This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.”

— Angela Carter

84. “A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Her freedom will be a condition of personal privilege that deprives those on which she exercises it of her own freedom. The most extreme kind of this deprivation is murder. These women murder.”

— Angela Carter

85. “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.”

— Angela Carter

86. “Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.”

— Angela Carter

87. “There are some eyes that can eat you.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

90. “There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption.”

— Angela Carter

91. “To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion.”

— Angela Carter

92. “Just because we’re sisters under the skin doesn’t mean we’ve got much in common.”

— Angela Carter

93. “And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.”

— Angela Carter

94. “She is obscene to the extent to which she is beautiful. Her beauty, her submissiveness and the false expectations that these qualities will do her some good are what make her obscene.”

— Angela Carter

95. “The lilies i always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.”

— Angela Carter

96. “How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.”

— Angela Carter

97. “Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.”

— Angela Carter

98. “She goes out at night more often now; the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significance.”

— Angela Carter

99. “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.”

— Angela Carter

100. “And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, orange of tiger-lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from a florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream.”

— Angela Carter