Angela Carter
Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.Collection: Movies
What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?Collection: Marriage
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.Collection: Experience
Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.Collection: Death
Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.Collection: Dad
You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.
I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
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.
Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.
It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.
Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.
What a joy it is to dance and sing!
In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
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.
A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.
Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
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.
In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.
If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?
A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.
Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.
It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.
It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.
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.
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.
It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.
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.
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.Collection: Culture
Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.Collection: World
There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.Collection: Acts Of Love
A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.Collection: Book
There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.Collection: Past
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.Collection: Sex
I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.Collection: Shadow
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 forceCollection: Taken
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.Collection: Men
A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.Collection: Girl
And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses.... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread.Collection: Mother
A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.Collection: Heart
We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.Collection: Humanity
Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast.Collection: Home
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.Collection: Book
Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.Collection: Satire
She stood lost in eternity wearing a crazy dress, watching the immense sky.Collection: Sky