Angela Carter was a British author who excelled in writing novels, short stories, poems and was also a journalist of great repute. After finishing high school, she started working as a journalist for the London based publication Croydon Advertiser but later on went on to complete her university education at University of Bristol. She studied English Literature and it seems that she put her education to good use, as she became a writer of prominence in post Second World War Britain. She wrote plenty of plays, novels, poetry collections and short stories that are read even to this day. The 1984 novel ‘Nights at the Circus’ is probably her best work and in fact has been named as the finest book to have ever won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Carter was one of the very few writers of her time who dealt with the theme of magic realism in her works and in addition to that, her writing had strong feminist messages that was also quite ahead of the time. Here are some of the selected quotes from Angela Carter that would certainly be applicable even in this day and age.
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.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Angela Carter
She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.
Angela Carter
The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.
Angela Carter
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 invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.
Angela Carter
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
Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.
Angela Carter
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.
Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.
And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.
Angela Carter
Wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away, either.
Angela Carter
Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
We must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.
A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.
Angela Carter
The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
Angela Carter
How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?
Angela Carter
Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with
Angela Carter
When I’d first loved him, I wanted to take him apart, as a child dismembers a clockwork toy, to comprehend the inscrutable mechanics of its interior.”
-flesh and the mirror
Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.
Angela Carter
Then she broke down and cried onto the flowery wrapping paper. Melanie put her arms around the poor, thin body. What is Aunt Margaret made of? Birdbones and tissue paper. spun glass and straw.
Angela Carter
A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.
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.
...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.
Angela Carter
Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.
Angela Carter
Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.
Angela Carter
At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.
Angela Carter
Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through.
Angela Carter
How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.
See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.
Angela Carter
I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.
He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance.
Below me, in spreading, concentric circles, like those a fish makes when it rises in still water, spun round the lower tiers; above me arched the black sky pierced by the gas jets of the stars.
She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.
Angela Carter
She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.
Angela Carter
Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!
Angela Carter
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
Angela Carter
It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.
Angela Carter
Ironing's nice and simple,' he said. 'I get all tangled up in words when I'm putting together those interminable papers....
She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the window of her eyes and this is very frightening.
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