Top 200 Angela Carter Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”

— Angela Carter

152. “You never saw such a wild thing as my mother.”

— Angela Carter

153. “Despair is the constant companion of the clown.”

— Angela Carter

154. “Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: “It can’t last.” She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense.”

— Angela Carter

155. “ESCAPING SLOWLY.”

— Angela Carter

156. “I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: “What is the most miraculous event in the world?” And I answer myself: “I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.”

— Angela Carter

157. “Erl-King lives.”

— Angela Carter

158. “He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.”

— Angela Carter

159. “Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphic weather, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to venture out late, scuttling along by the churchyard wall with half a juicy torso slung across his back. The white light scours the fields and scours them again until everything gleams and he will leave paw-prints in the hoar-frost when he runs howling round the graves at night in his lupine fiestas.”

— Angela Carter

160. “Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality.”

— Angela Carter

161. “I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.”

— Angela Carter

162. “Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.”

— Angela Carter

163. “Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does.”

— Angela Carter

164. “It was a sensitive and musical dog.”

— Angela Carter

165. “It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.”

— Angela Carter

166. “Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them...”

— Angela Carter

167. “Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.”

— Angela Carter

168. “They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.”

— Angela Carter

169. “The triumph of the will recreates, as its Utopia, the world of early childhood, and that is a world of nightmare, impotence and fear, in which the child fantasises, out of its own powerlessness, an absolute supremacy.”

— Angela Carter

170. “It doesn’t matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.”

— Angela Carter

171. “Her carved eyeballs stared back at them with the uncanny blindness of statues, who seem always to be perceiving another dimension, where everything is statues.”

— Angela Carter

172. “The more I saw of love, the less I liked the look of it.”

— Angela Carter

173. “She learns her lesson at once; to escape slavery, she must embrace tyranny.”

— Angela Carter

174. “Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.”

— Angela Carter

175. “So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious and resourceful as: Puss-in-Boots!”

— Angela Carter

176. “For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields.”

— Angela Carter

177. “I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.”

— Angela Carter

178. “For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.”

— Angela Carter

179. “And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke’s palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can’t handle their cash just like the rich can’t, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.”

— Angela Carter

180. “I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking.”

— Angela Carter

181. “The touch of her hand filled me with a wild loneliness.”

— Angela Carter

182. “The rich can afford to be virtuous, the poor must shift as best they can.”

— Angela Carter

183. “But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine’s suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there is none, it turns out, in her virtue itself; it does nobody any good, least of all herself.”

— Angela Carter

184. “It’s one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves.”

— Angela Carter

185. “The heart’s egoism sees itself suffering when it sees another suffering and so it learns sympathy, because it can put itself into another’s place; then the heart comes a little way out of its egoism and tentatively encounters the world. But, before the prospect of its own suffering, the heart melts completely and retreats into egoism, again, to protect itself.”

— Angela Carter

186. “The kind of power mothers have is enormous.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

188. “She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.”

— Angela Carter

189. “I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.”

— Angela Carter

190. “The air shuddered with the beginning of absence.”

— Angela Carter

191. “From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.”

— Angela Carter

192. “You’re nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights.”

— Angela Carter

193. “It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre – the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.”

— Angela Carter

194. “And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he was alive from the desire of the woods.”

— Angela Carter

195. “Justine’s virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology.”

— Angela Carter

196. “The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.”

— Angela Carter

197. “One of Sade’s singularities is that he offers an absolutely sexualised view of the world, a sexualisation that permeates everything, much as his atheism does and, since he is not a religious man but a political man, he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality.”

— Angela Carter

198. “It was the beginning of an anxiety that would never end, except with the deaths of either or both; and anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but it is not compatible with innocence.”

— Angela Carter

199. “I am happy only in that I am a monster.”

— Angela Carter

200. “Excretion is his first concrete production and, through it, the child gains his first experience of labour relations. He may reserve the right to go on excremental strike or to engage in a form of faecal offensive. The excremental faculty is a manipulative device and to be baulked of the free control of it is to be deprived of the first, most elementary, expression of autonomy.”

— Angela Carter