381 Quotes by Angela Carter

Most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode.

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.

Que yo y otras muchas mujeres vayamos buscando heroínas de cuento de hadas en los libros es otra versión del mismo proceso: deseo validar mi reivindicación a poseer una parte equitativa del futuro, y expreso para ello la exigencia de que me concedan la parte del pasado que me corresponde.

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.

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.

Lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero

You must not think my father valued me at less than a king's ransom; but, at no more than a king's ransom.

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.