Quotes from Angela Carter

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.

Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.

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.

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

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.

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.

These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye...

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.

It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

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.