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Quotes by Angela Carter

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.
– 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
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
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
– Angela Carter
Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
– Angela Carter
I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.
– Angela Carter
I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.
– Angela Carter
I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.
– Angela Carter
In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.
– Angela Carter
It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.
– Angela Carter
Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.
– 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
Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
– Angela Carter
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
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.
– Angela Carter
The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
– Angela Carter
The fin is coming early this siecle.
– Angela Carter
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
The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder.
– Angela Carter
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
They danced the dance of the outcasts for the outcasts who watched them, amid the louring trees, with a blizzard coming on.
– Angela Carter
This dance was the dance of death. The clowns danced it for the wretched of the earth, that they might witness their own wretchedness.
– Angela Carter
Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
– Angela Carter
Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.
– Angela Carter
What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
– Angela Carter
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
Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.
– 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
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