Angela Carter Quotes

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

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

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

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.

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

The end of exile is the end of being.

And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.

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

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

Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.

In this country you do not need to think, but only to look, and soon you think you understand everything.

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.

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

...a great future behind him, already

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

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

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.

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.

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

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

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

We keep the wolves outside by living well.

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

See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.

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

Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge ... The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?

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.

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

They say there's an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on.

The air shuddered with the beginning of absence.

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

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth.

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

Destruction is only another aspect of being.

She walked in technicolor.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

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

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?

I'm sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class. Actually.

ordered me a sky from a florist

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

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

And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.

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

Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.

When the sun goes down, it is very cold and then I easily start crying because the winter moon pierces my heart

The Smile of Winter

Degredation is the subtlest drug, the most insinuating. But they could do nothing to me I had not already imagined.

This is some kind of heretical, possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Roscicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie!

My father lost me to the Beast at cards

My fays shall lullaby you as we cuddle up on my mattress of dandelion down.

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

Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.

Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does.

There are some eyes that can eat you.

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

All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched

As if your essence were hung up in a closet like a dress too good to be worn and you were reduced to going out in only your appearance.

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

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing.

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

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.

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

But needs must when the devil drives.

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

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

Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her.

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

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

Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.

Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.

Despair is the constant companion of the clown.

Irish was a man of parts even if some of them didn't work too well.

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

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

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

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

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

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

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

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

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

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.

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

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.

Ruin had been the original blueprint and men and women had lived here only in a necessary but intermediate stage of the execution of the grand design

I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.

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

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

I am happy only in that I am a monster.

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