“We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies–all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“While we were doing it, everything seemed possible, I must say. But that is the illusion of the act. Now I remember how everything seemed possible when I was doing it, but as soon as I stopped, not, as if fucking itself were the origin of illusion.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“It was as lovely a summer as those that precede wars.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Conscience
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“But Irish had an old soul, you might say. He was a man with a great future behind him, already.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Disappointment
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with itshard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it–the Bovary syndrome.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is aclever confidence trick.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life: “Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Character
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday’s washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest–a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Atheism
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Death
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: “This is the end.” Because it would have been.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Death
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“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 likethe plague.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Morality
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“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 whatwe must contend with.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Hope
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art asa means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Comedy
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Relationship
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.”
Angela Carter
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General