381 Quotes by 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.

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.

A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.