Angela Carter Quotes - Page 6

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It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

Angela Carter

Passion, Literature, Objects

"Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories".

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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.

Angela Carter

Girl, Children, Lovely

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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.

Angela Carter

Mother, War, Magic Realism

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

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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 much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

Angela Carter

Eye, Mirrors, Sight

Angela Carter (2012). “The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories”, p.6, Random House

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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.

Angela Carter

White, Promise, Faces

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He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

Angela Carter

Revenge, Thinking, Language

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

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There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

Angela Carter

Knowledge, Needs, Brushes

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And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.

Angela Carter

Useless Things, Cash, Way

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With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

Angela Carter

Girl, Wall, Flower

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As for my father, few souls are less troubled. He can be simply pleased with us, pleased that we exist, and, from the vantage point of his wondrously serene old age, he contemplates our lives almost as if they were books he can dip into whenever he wants. His back pages, perhaps.

Angela Carter

Father, Book, Soul

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

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Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.

Angela Carter

Kissing, Blood, Degrees

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Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to reproduce, which is her pride, is, since it is beyond choice, not a specific virtue of her own.

Angela Carter

Mother, Pride, Ideas

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Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you must have gathered, is the smile I wear.

Angela Carter

Beach, Loneliness, Ocean

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I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

Angela Carter

Country, Cutting, Hands

Angela Carter (1985). “Black Venus”, Random House (UK)

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You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.

Angela Carter

Long, Shadow, Emptiness

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

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It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.

Angela Carter

Awards, Purpose, Growing

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So I suppose I do not know how he really looked, and, in fact, I suppose I shall never know, now, for he was plainly an object created in the mode of fantasy. His image was already present somewhere in my head and I was seeking to discover it in actuality, looking at every face I met in case it was the right face - that is, the face which corresponded to my notion of the unseen face of the one I should love, a face created parthenogeneticallyby the rage to love which consumed me.

Angela Carter

Unseen, Faces, Facts

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

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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.

Angela Carter

Glasses, Should Have, Watches

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

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Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.

Angela Carter

Taken, Cat, Acceptance

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

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His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanesecence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intagible relfections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.

Angela Carter

Morning, Children, Moving

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And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kitchen?... The scoured gleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, before which my mother bowed in perpetual homage, a fringe of sweat upon her upper lip and the fire glowing in her cheeks.

Angela Carter

Mother, Air, Glowing

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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.

Angela Carter

Monday, Morning, Atheist

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

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Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty looks, pet. Come here. She did not move. He ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed. Come here, he said again, softly. So she went.

Angela Carter

Moving, Hair, Pet

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

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