Angela Carter

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

— Angela Carter

A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.

— Angela Carter

“I'm sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class. Actually.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

She stood lost in eternity wearing a crazy dress, watching the immense sky.

— Angela Carter

“I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.”

— Angela Carter

“The enchantment of that bright, sad, pretty place enveloped her and she found that, against all her expectations, she was happy there.”

— Angela Carter

You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in…

— Angela Carter

“Then she broke down and cried onto the flowery wrapping paper. Melanie put her arms around the poor, thin body. What is…

— Angela Carter

[T]ea, that uniquely English meal, that unnecessary collation at which no stimulants--neither alcohol nor meat--are served, that comforting repast of which to…

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

“She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring…

— 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

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its…

— Angela Carter

“I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: "What is the most miraculous…

— 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…

— Angela Carter

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of…

— Angela Carter

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art…

— Angela Carter

I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation…

— Angela Carter

Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer.…

— Angela Carter

“Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we…

— Angela Carter

“People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as…

— Angela Carter

“In a state of mental tumult, conflict and disorientation, he wanders the freezing city night, now gazing at the ice thickening on…

— Angela Carter

“Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too…

— Angela Carter

Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter…

— Angela Carter

His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat…

— Angela Carter

“The notion of a natural propensity for vice is essential to Sadeian psychology; vice is innate, as is virtue, if social conditions…

— Angela Carter

“At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all…

— Angela Carter

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the…

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

“Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her.”

— Angela Carter

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

— Angela Carter

“How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.”

— Angela Carter

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

— Angela Carter

“I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it.”

— Angela Carter

“October, crisp, misty, golden October, when the light is sweet and heavy.”

— Angela Carter

“She had given herself to the world in her entirety and then found nothing was left”

— Angela Carter

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

— Angela Carter