Top 200 Angela Carter Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “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.”

— Angela Carter

102. “Women’s sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.”

— Angela Carter

103. “She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

105. “For now my skin was my sole capital in the world and today I’d make my first investment.”

— Angela Carter

106. “His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you would bear me.”

— Angela Carter

107. “I think I want to be in love with you but I don’t know how.”

— Angela Carter

108. “The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.”

— Angela Carter

109. “The real value of a sexually attractive woman in a world which regards good looks as a commodity depends on the degree to which she puts her looks to work for her.”

— Angela Carter

110. “Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real.”

— Angela Carter

111. “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; grace could not come to the world from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.”

— Angela Carter

112. “But needs must when the devil drives.”

— Angela Carter

113. “It was the fault of the wedding-dress night, when she married the shadows and the world ended.”

— Angela Carter

114. “The victim is always morally superior to the master; that is the victim’s ambivalent triumph. That is why there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men; our victim status ensures that we rarely have the opportunity.”

— Angela Carter

115. “She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: ‘I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!’ She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

117. “Irish was a man of parts even if some of them didn’t work too well.”

— Angela Carter

118. “She was too young, too soft and new, to come to terms with these wild beings whose minds veered at crazy angles from the short, straight, smooth lines of her own experience.”

— Angela Carter

119. “Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it!”

— Angela Carter

120. “Do you not feel... that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.”

— Angela Carter

121. “I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.”

— Angela Carter

122. “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.”

— Angela Carter

123. “Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season.”

— Angela Carter

124. “Sometimes he lays his head on my lap and lets me comb his lovely hair for him; his combings are leaves of every tree in the wood and dryly susurrate around my feet.”

— Angela Carter

125. “The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they’re likely to have amongst themselves too keep them all in order.”

— Angela Carter

126. “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.”

— Angela Carter

127. “There had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils.”

— Angela Carter

128. “How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.”

— Angela Carter

129. “At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.”

— Angela Carter

130. “She looks wonderful, but she doesn’t look right.”

— Angela Carter

131. “Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can’t be ironic all the time.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

134. “There are limits to the power of laughter and though I may hint at them from time to time, I do not propose to step over them.”

— Angela Carter

135. “The enchantment of that bright, sad, pretty place enveloped her and she found that, against all her expectations, she was happy there.”

— Angela Carter

136. “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.”

— Angela Carter

137. “He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.”

— Angela Carter

138. “It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.”

— Angela Carter

139. “Fevvers felt that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations n order to be a woman. She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea.”

— Angela Carter

140. “The dead know something we don’t, although they keep it to themselves.”

— Angela Carter

141. “He knew it was too late to turn back and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies.”

— Angela Carter

142. “Necessary connections are fabulous beasts.”

— Angela Carter

143. “One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.”

— Angela Carter

144. “For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff’s pillow – we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it’s been fun or it’s been not. So all cats have a politician’s air; we smile and smile and so they think we’re villains.”

— Angela Carter

145. “She walked in technicolor.”

— Angela Carter

146. “Old wives’ tales – that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

148. “If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?”

— Angela Carter

149. “The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.”

— Angela Carter

150. “Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.”

— Angela Carter