Angela Carter Quotes - Page 5

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

Angela Carter

Battle, Toenails, Habit

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The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind only if he arrives there in full possession of his partial faculties--that is, providing he is perfectly aware of the precise nature of sight and does not confuse it with second sightnor with madness.

Angela Carter

Country, Kings, Men

Angela Carter (1984). “Nights at the circus”, Vintage

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ordered me a sky from a florist

Angela Carter

Sky

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

Angela Carter

Stars, Eye, Doors

Angela Carter (2012). “Wise Children”, p.91, Random House

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

Angela Carter

Work, Sarcasm, Men

Angela Carter (2012). “Wise Children”, p.122, Random House

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Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy fluxitself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things.

Angela Carter

Creativity, Optimism, Rabbits

Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

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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.

Angela Carter

Clever, Experience, Literature

Angela Carter (2015). “The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History”, p.10, Hachette UK

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

Angela Carter

Sleep, Bed, Tables

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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.

Angela Carter

May, Determined, Blame

Angela Carter (1977). “The Passion of New Eve”, Harcourt

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

Angela Carter

Order, Miracle, Age

Angela Carter (1984). “Nights at the circus”, Vintage

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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.

Angela Carter

Jobs, Real, Nurse

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

Angela Carter

Grandmother, Grandparent, Together

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I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.

Angela Carter

Fun, Book, Mean

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One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.

Angela Carter

Moon, Night, Sight

Angela Carter (1971). “Love: a novel”

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He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.

Angela Carter

Dolls, Details, Language

Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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Though I still turn up my coat-collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they’re only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally isn’t it? Everything else is artful.

Angela Carter

Lonely, Character, Mirrors

Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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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?

Angela Carter

Country, Simple, Squad

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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.

Angela Carter

Beautiful, Hair, Water

Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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

Angela Carter

Years, Hours, Mets

Angela Carter (1977). “The Passion of New Eve”, Harcourt

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Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

Angela Carter

Change, Historical, Enemy

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Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

Angela Carter

Hope, Eye, Men

Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

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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.

Angela Carter

Running, Men, Spy

Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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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 not know how to shiver.

Angela Carter

Moving, Eggs, Space

Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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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 transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.

Angela Carter

Art, Real, Order

Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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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.

Angela Carter

Dad, Father, Aeneas

Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

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Born: May 7, 1940
Died: February 16, 1992
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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