Quote

we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.

Angela Carter

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Angela Carter
Age: 51 †
Born: 1940
Born: May 7
Died: 1992
Died: February 16
Author
Journalist
Linguist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Eastbourne
Sussex
Angela Olive Stalker Carter
Angela Olive Carter
Angela Olive Stalker
Angela Olive Pearce
Must
Seem
Paltry
Life
Alone
Trivial
Poor
Symbols
Nature
Absurd
Form
Forms
Seems
Determined
May
Blame
Take
However

More quotes by Angela Carter

Image
The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
Angela Carter
Image
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.
Angela Carter
Image
The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.
Angela Carter
Image
Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.
Angela Carter
Image
Your thin white face, chérie he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.
Angela Carter
Image
Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I wil become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty.
Angela Carter
Image
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane she is a closed system she does not know how to shiver.
Angela Carter
Image
Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.
Angela Carter
Image
Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets his is the grand, messy fluxitself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things.
Angela Carter
Image
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling I love the company of wolves.
Angela Carter
Image
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Angela Carter
Image
I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
Angela Carter
Image
The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing.
Angela Carter
Image
What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?
Angela Carter
Image
Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through.
Angela Carter
Image
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Angela Carter
Image
Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty looks, pet. Come here. She did not move. He ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed. Come here, he said again, softly. So she went.
Angela Carter
Image
The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.
Angela Carter
Image
I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.
Angela Carter
Image
How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?
Angela Carter