Quotes from Angela Carter

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.

You must realize that 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.

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with

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

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven't got a family of their own, they will invent one.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

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

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

If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?

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

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.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

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.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.

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

The kind of power mothers have is enormous. Take the skyline of Istanbul -- enormous breasts, pathetic little willies, a final revenge on Islam. I was so scared I had to crouch in the bottom of the boat when I saw it.

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.

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I was born. In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.

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.