Angela Carter Quotes

Angela Carter delivers witty, thought-provoking musings on gender, identity and economics.

17 quotes

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

2. 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.

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

4. Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it.

5. Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.

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

7. Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

8. What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the truth?' She nodded. 'The firing squad.' 'That's not the whole truth. Try again.' 'Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness. 'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.' He was silent for several minutes. 'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.' 'Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?

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

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

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

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

13. My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday's washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest--a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.

14. Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!

15. And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.

16. In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.

17. We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies-all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.