Quotes by Angela Carter

About Angela Carter:

Angela Carter was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.

Angela Carter

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely ...

Angela Carter

I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must know 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.

Angela Carter

How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.

Angela Carter

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how ...

Angela Carter

Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time--it is the clue, like Ariadne's, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with w...

Angela Carter

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.

Angela Carter

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does no...

Angela Carter

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

Angela Carter

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.

Angela Carter

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.

Angela Carter

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 a...

Angela Carter

To be heroic does not have to mean possessing the ability to stand against the evils of the world, either well or successfully, but just that one is willing to stand.

Angela Carter

The hero, it might be said, is called into being when perception of a need an the recognition of responsibility toward it are backed up by the will to act.

Angela Carter

To be heroic may mean nothing more than this then, to stand in the face of the status quo, in the face of an easy collapse into the madness of an increasingly chaotic world and represent another way.

Angela Carter

She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some ...

Angela Carter

MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked...

Angela Carter

At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.

Angela Carter

She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked after the poor and laid their tender napes beneath a husband’s booted...

Angela Carter

She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...

Angela Carter

Author Bio

  • NameAngela Carter
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist
  • BornMay 7, 1940
  • DiedFebruary 16, 1992
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionLinguist; Screenwriter; Novelist; Writer
  • AwardsJames Tait Black Memorial Prize; John Llewellyn Rhys Prize