WednesdayJan 14, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Angela Carter (May 7, 1940 - February 16, 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism and science fiction works.
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.
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.
Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.
There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: 'Where was I before I was born.' In the beginning was ... what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.
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.
The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.
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.
Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.
Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers.... Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.
Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.
Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
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 like the plague.
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