Top 200 Angela Carter Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

153. “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

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

156. “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

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

— Angela Carter

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Angela Carter

166. “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

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

169. “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

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

— Angela Carter

171. “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

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

— Angela Carter

173. “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

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

178. “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

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

— Angela Carter

180. “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

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

— Angela Carter

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Angela Carter

185. “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

186. “What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

191. “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

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

194. “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

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

— Angela Carter

196. “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

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

— Angela Carter

199. “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

200. “Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?”

— Angela Carter