381 Quotes by Angela Carter

We keep the wolves outside by living well.

But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine’s suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there is none, it turns out, in her virtue itself; it does nobody any good, least of all herself.

She was too young, too soft and new, to come to terms with these wild beings whose minds veered at crazy angles from the short, straight, smooth lines of her own experience.

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.

Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you always thought: “It can’t last.” She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense.

It was the fault of the wedding-dress night, when she married the shadows and the world ended.

I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father’s farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass.

Do you not feel... that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.

ESCAPING SLOWLY.